Page "Irish Houses of Parliament" Paragraph 28

Leaders from O ' Connell to Parnell and later John Redmond spoke of the proud day when an Irish parliament might once again meet in what they called Grattan's Parliament in College Green.

When, in 1911, King George V and his consort Queen Mary visited Dublin ( where they attracted mass crowds ), street sellers sold drawings of the King and Queen arriving in the not too distant future at the Old Houses of Parliament in College Green to open the newly re-established Irish parliament.

In 1914, the Third Home Rule Act did indeed complete all parliamentary stages and receive the Royal Assent.

The day when the old Parliament House would one day become the seat of parliament once again seemed around the corner.

However, the intervening First World War provided what proved to be a fatal delay for Home Rule.

In late April 1916, a small band of radical Republicans under Patrick Pearse staged the Easter Rising, in which they seized a number of prominent Irish buildings, mainly in Dublin, and proclaimed an Irish Republic.

Surprisingly, one building they did not take over was the old Parliament House.

Perhaps they feared that, as a bank, it would be heavily protected.

Perhaps, already expecting that the Rising would ultimately fail and that the reaction to the Rising and what Pearse called their " blood sacrifice ", rather than the Rising itself, would reawaken Irish nationalism and produce independence, they did not seek to use the building for fear that it, like the GPO, would be destroyed in the British counter-attack.

Or perhaps, because of its association with a former Ascendancy parliament, it carried little symbolism for their new republic.