Co. Louth

At Dundalk the principal proprietor was the Earl of Roden, by inheritance from his uncle the Earl of Clanbrassill. He controlled the corporation by restricting the freemen. The return of a Member at the Union was delayed while Roden, who had supported the measure from ‘positive conviction’, came to terms with government. In the event, he returned Isaac Corry in exchange for a place at the navigation board for his brother-in-law John Stratton, one of the retiring Members. Roden was anxious not to ‘endanger the borough which was once so nearly lost to the family’, and on 16 Nov.

Drogheda, the fifth city in Ireland, specialized in linen manufacture and was governed by an exclusively protestant corporation. Representatives of two mercantile families vied for the representation: the Meade Ogles, whose interest dated from over 30 years before the Union and who were abetted on the corporation by Alderman Ralph Smyth; and Edward Hardman, who was sponsored by the veteran neighbouring politician, John Foster of Collon, whose interest was of a personal, rather than a territorial kind.

Drogheda, a city and county of itself straddling the Boyne about four miles from the sea, had a declining linen industry, and though possessed of ‘good streets and excellent houses’ in ‘its interior’, was surrounded by ‘rows of the most wretched mud cabins’ extending ‘for at least a mile from the town’, which in their ‘filth’ and the ‘ragged appearance of the inmates’ were ‘as miserable a suburb as any in Ireland’.

Dundalk, the ‘oldest borough in Ireland’, had little of the ‘spectacle of poverty’ that ‘all through the county of Louth stares one in the face’. A ‘respectable looking town’, its increasing prosperity was attributed to its role as ‘a mart for agricultural produce and a shipping port for cattle’, and to the patronage of the Jocelyns of Dundalk House, earls of Roden.PP (1831-2), xliii. 57; H.D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834, ii.