The ancient Irish loved their laws and took pride in obeying and
enforcing them. The different attitude of the modern Irish towards
foreign laws and administration is amply explained by the morally
indefensible character of those laws and that administration, to be
read in English statutes and ordinances and in the history of English
rule in Ireland--a subject too vast and harrowing, and in every sense
foreign to what has gone before, to be entered upon here. Though the
Parliament of 1782-1800 was little more than a Pale Parliament, in
which the mass of the Irish people had no representation whatever,
one of its Acts, to its credit be it said, was an attempt to mitigate
the Penal Laws and emancipate the oppressed Gaelic and Catholic
population of Ireland. With the partial exception of that brief
interval, law in Ireland has, during the last 360 years, meant
English laws specially enacted for the destruction of any Irish trade
or industry that entered into competition with a corresponding
English trade or industry. In later times those crude barbarities
have been gradually superseded by the more defensible laws now in
force in Ireland, all of which can be studied in statutes passed by
the Parliament, since the Union with Scotland, called British.


REFERENCES:

Pending the desirable work of a more competent Brehon Law Commission
and translators, the subject must be studied in the six volumes of
_Ancient Laws of Ireland_, produced by the first Commission, from
1865 to 1901, ignoring the long introductions and many of the notes.
Whitley Stokes: Criticism of Atkinson's Glossary (London, 1903); R.
Dareste: Etudes d'histoire de droit (Paris, 1889); d'Arbois de
Jubainville and Paul Collinet: Etudes sur le droit celtique, 2 vols.