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The Irish Houses of Parliament (also known as the '''Irish Parliament House''', now called the ''' Bank Of Ireland , College Green ''' due to its modern day use as a branch of the bank) was the world's first purpose-built two-chamber parliament house. It served as the seat of both chambers (the Lords and Commons ) of the Irish parliament of the Kingdom Of Ireland for most of the eighteenth century until that parliament was abolished by the Act Of Union in 1800 when the island became part of the United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Ireland . In the 17th Century , parliament had settled in ''Chichester House'', a mansion in Hoggen Green (later renamed College Green) that had been owned by Sir George Carew , President of Munster and Lord High Treasurer of Ireland , and which had been built on the site of a nunnery disbanded by King Henry VIII after the dissolution of the monasteries. Carew's house, (later renamed Chichester House after a later owner Sir Arthur Chichester ) was already a building of sufficient importance to have become a temporary home of the Kingdom Of Ireland 's law courts during the Michaelmas law term in 1605 . Most famously, the legal documentation facilitating the Plantation Of Ulster had been signed in the house on 16 November 1612 . PLANS FOR THE NEW BUILDING The house was in a dilapidated state, allegedly haunted and unfit for parliamentary use. In 1727 parliament voted to spend £6,000 on the building of a new parliament building on the site. It was to be the first purpose-built two-chamber parliament building in the world. The then ancient Palace Of Westminster , the seat of the English (before 1707 ) and the British parliament, was merely a converted building; the House of Commons's odd seating arrangements was due to the chamber's previous existence as a chapel. Hence MPs faced each other from former pews, a seating arrangement continued when the new British Houses of Parliament were built in the mid- Nineteenth Century after the mediæval building was destroyed by fire. (It was also followed in the 1940s , when the then House of Commons chamber was bombed during World War II , though consideration had been given to replacing it with a semi-circular chamber instead.) The design of this radical new Irish parliamentary building, one of the two purpose-built Irish parliamentary buildings in history (the other being the Stormont parliament), was trusted to a talented young architect, Edward Lovett Pearce , who was himself a Member of Parliament and a protégé of the Speaker of the House of Commons, William Connolly of Castletown House . While building begun, parliament moved to the Blue Coat Hospital on Dublin's northside. The foundation stone for the new building was laid on the 3rd of February 1729 . DESIGN OF THE NEW BUILDING ]] Pearce's design for the new Irish Houses of Parliament was revolutionary. The building was effectively semi-circular in shape, occupying nearly an Acre and a half (6,000 m²) of ground. Unlike ''Chichester House'', which was set far back from Hoggen Green, the new building was to open up directly onto the Green, as the above photograph shows. The principal entrance consisted of a colonnade of Ionic columns extending around three sides of the entrance quadrangle, forming a letter 'E' (see picture at the bottom of the page). Three statues, representing Hibernia (the Latin name for Ireland), Fidelity and Commerce stood above the portico. Over the main entrance, the royal coat of arms were cut in stone. The building itself underwent extensions by renowned architect James Gandon (Pearce died young, robbing Ireland of a young architect of outstanding potential.) In particular, Gandon, who was responsible for three of Dublin's finest buildings, The Custom House , the Four Courts and the King's Inns , added on a new peers' entrance onto Westmoreland Street (shown above) at the east of the building between 1785 and 1789. Unlike the main entrance to the south, which came to be known as the House of Commons entrance, Gandon's peers' entrance used six Corinthian columns, at the request of peers who wished to have ''their'' entrance marked by a different look to the entrance of the commoners who used Ionic columns. Over the entrance, three statues were placed, representing Fortitude, Justice and Liberty. A curved wall joined the Pearce entrance to Gandon's extension. That this curved wall did not actually mark the exterior of the building but masked the actual uneven joins of some of the extension is shown in the view at the bottom of this page. |
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