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The Constitution of 1782 is a collective term given to a series of legal changes which freed the Parliament of Ireland, a Medieval parliament consisting of the Irish House of Commons and the Irish House of Lords, of legal restrictions that had been imposed by successive Norman, English, and later, British governments on the scope of its jurisdiction. These restrictions had, in effect, allowed the Irish executive of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to control the parliamentary agenda and to restrict its ability to legislate solely in the best interest of the people of Ireland rather than the objectives of the monarchy of the three kingdoms.

The most punitive restrictions arose in Poynings' Law of 1494. These restrictions were lifted in 1782, producing a period of novel legislative freedom. This period came to be known as Grattan's Parliament after Henry Grattan, a major campaigner for reform in the House of Commons. Under the Act of Union 1800, however, the Irish Parliament merged with the Parliament of Great Britain to form the United Kingdom Parliament in 1801, ending the period of legislative freedom. This continued until 1922, after which most of Ireland was granted its own sovereign parliament, known as Dail Eireann. Northern Ireland, however, continued to be represented in the United Kingdom Parliament, although it too was granted a subordinate Parliament of Northern Ireland.

The eighteenth-century Old Irish Parliament House is located in College Green in Dublin. It was the first purpose-built two-chamber parliament, pre-dating the nineteenth century Palace of Westminster and the United States Capitol). It survives today in use as headquaters of the Bank of Ireland, College Green. While the chamber of the Irish House of Commons was dismantled after the Act of Union, the chamber of the Irish House of Lords still exists in its original Georgian design.

See also

Irish Patriot Party

• Articles lacking sources from April 2008
• 1782 in law
• 1782 in Ireland
• Irish constitutional law