The Irish Parish

Post date: Jul 11, 2011 8:48:24 AM

People tracing their roots sometimes get confused with the parish unit in Ireland. It is believed that the parish concept originated as ecclesiastical units from the end of the sixth century onwards, based on monastic settlements. The early organisation of the Irish church was diocesan and episcopal, but by the end of the seventh century it had evolved into a monastic system, dominated by great monasteries like Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, Durrow, Kildare and Glendalough. This structure continued until the reforms of the twelfth century when, following the Synod of Ráth Bhreasail in 1111 and the Synod of Kells/Mellifont in 1152, the diocesan and parochial system was adopted. Ecclesiastical parishes were formally constituted after the Synod of Kells/Mellifont and appear to have been based on the existing monastic units, with their boundaries determined by the politico-ecclesiastical and demographic considerations obtaining at that time.

In the sixteenth century, the English government in Ireland accepted the existing framework of parishes as units of civil administration, when they became known as ‘civil parishes’. They were used as administrative units for various surveys in the seventeenth century and subsequently. General outlines of the civil parishes date from the twelfth century, but it was the nineteenth century before their boundaries were defined with a degree of precision. The Ordnance Survey recorded 2,420 civil parishes in Ireland in the 1830s.

With the extension of the Reformation to Ireland and the dissolution of monastic orders in the sixteenth century, as well as other changes, parochial administration became very difficult for the Catholic Church. After the Reformation, the Established Church (Protestant) and the Catholic Church in Ireland began to use different parochial units. The civil parishes (which had been in all cases the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical parishes) were adopted by the Established Church, but in some cases, because of population, they had to be amalgamated for ecclesiastical administration. After Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the civil and Catholic parish units diverged in many parts of the country. The Catholic Church authorities ignored the civil boundaries, and marked out new parish units more in keeping with the demographic, social, economic and ecclesiastical requirements of the time, based on towns and villages, and often taking new names, like that of the chief town in a locality. Because of the traditional religious homogeneity of the population, the Catholic parish became a very important entity, with the church, schools, parochial hall and various amenities major focal points in the life of a local community. In addition to religious ceremonies, the parish became the centre of community identity around which social, cultural and sporting events were organised.

The word 'parish' today can refer to three different units: the civil parish, the Catholic Church parish, or a Church of Ireland parish (the latter is now an amalgamation of a number of civil parishes). In practice, the civil parish is now an anachronism as an administrative entity, and census statistics relating to it as a unit have not been published since 1911. However, the civil parish was a specific administrative entity and recognised as such for centuries, with a wealth of literary references, and it is the parish unit to be used for many genealogical sources.