This morning.
Via The Victorian Commons:
…The idea was that each year Parliament would meet in Dublin for a session devoted entirely to Irish business. This had been suggested in June 1835 by the Leominster MP Thomas Bish, who moved to address the king on the subject, although his initiative attracted so little interest that the Commons was counted out before it could proceed further.
By mid-1848, however, Ireland had suffered an unprecedented famine and witnessed an abortive rising by the Young Ireland movement. In the wake of these events ways were sought to make Parliament more responsive to Ireland’s plight….
…The Society for the Promotion of Periodical Sittings of the Imperial Parliament in Dublin argued that holding an annual parliamentary session in Dublin would encourage the capital investment required to develop the country’s natural resources and stimulate trade, and might also coax the ‘wealthy and educated’ back to Dublin, which was then regarded as a ‘city of desolate palaces … without an aristocracy, and tenanted by struggling shopkeepers and half-famished artizans’.
No change there then.
Fight!
‘Rotatory Parliaments’: The 1848 campaign for parliamentary sessions in Ireland (The Victorian Commons)