People, Place and Power – The Grand Jury System in Ireland

10 1.1. People The Grand Jury: Composition and Membership For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the grand jury was the ‘most important local body in rural Ireland’. 2 Twice yearly, twenty-three of each county’s wealthiest, most powerful, persons came together at the spring (or Lent) and summer (or Lammas) assizes to conduct their civic and judicial responsibilities. These twenty-three people were always men, and most of them were Protestant. Their decisions exercised enormous influence on the everyday experience of people at local level across Ireland. It was the task of the sheriff to ensure that a grand jury could be appointed at the assizes, by calling the county’s grand jury panellists or grand panellists to the assizes town for the opening of each assizes session. The assizes commenced with the sheriff selecting twenty-three members from the panel, who were sworn in as grand jurors for the session. One of the first tasks faced by a new sheriff was the organization of the spring Assizes, usually held in March or April. The timing of a county’s assizes sitting was determined centrally, because two judges were required to attend, these travelling from county to county within ‘circuits’. Pomp and pageantry welcomed such distinguished visitors, as this account of the arrival of one of the North West Circuit justices into Enniskillen for the spring 1828 assizes shows: ‘Hon. Baron M’Clelland arrived in this town, escorted by the High Sheriff, Sir Henry Brooke, Bart., and a numerous cortege of mounted constabulary, bailiffs, &c. &c. He was received with due honour, by a Captain’s guard and the band of the 62d Regiment.’ The line between honouring a visitor and causing offence could, however, be quite fine. When Honourable Baron Smith travelled to Roscommon on a Sunday evening in March 1828, his carriage was surrounded by a mob hailing him ‘with their usual demonstrations of joy’. Cries echoed for an ‘illumination’ with tar barrels, but ‘some influential and more sensible persons remonstrated with the leaders of the mob on the impropriety of violating the Sabbath, and happily succeeded in their endeavours to disperse the crowd, by assuring them that their conduct was better calculated to excite feelings of disgust than those of approbation in the enlightened breast of the Honorable Baron’. 3