Co. Cork

Economic and social profile:

Economic and social profile

A small inland town pleasantly situated in ‘good wheat country’ on the fertile northern bank of the river Blackwater, Mallow, by the late eighteenth century, was ‘probably the most famous spa town in Ireland.’ Once much resorted to for its clear spring, it had since become unfashionable, having lost out to domestic and English competition.E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800, ii (2002), 211; H. Heany, A Scottish Whig in Ireland 1835-1838. The Irish Journals of Robert Graham of Redgorton (1999), 129-30.

Economic and social profile

Youghal, like Bandon, was one of the boroughs which, passing by marriage into the hands of the 4th Duke of Devonshire in 1753, had, through mismanagement, fallen under the influence of the earls of Shannon, who returned all the Members in this period.

Mallow, one of two manor boroughs which retained the right to representation after the Union, was theoretically in the gift of the Jephson family, who lived at Mallow Castle and owned all or most of the manor from which the freeholder electorate was derived.Wakefield, Account of Ireland, ii. 303. In practice, however, Denham Jephson’s influence was often more nominal than real.

By 1797 Lord de Clifford, an English absentee who owned about half the town land, had re-established his personal interest in this small port and potwalloping borough, most probably by creating a sufficient number of non-resident freemen from his Irish estates to overwhelm any resident opposition. In 1804 he successfully resisted a bid to establish freedom by right rather than by selection. His interest returned the Members throughout, all of them relatives.

Cork was Ireland’s second most important commercial centre and, like Dublin, continued to return two Members after the Union.

During the 1730s and 1740s the patron of the largely protestant borough of Bandon, Lord Burlington, entrusted the general management of his Irish affairs to his nephew Henry Boyle, later 1st Earl of Shannon. Upon his death in 1753 his personal interest in the borough passed to his daughter and heir, the wife of the 4th Duke of Devonshire. This was the origin of a dispute between the Shannons and the Devonshires over the control of the borough which persisted until the end of this period.