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The Irish parliament sat from 17 January to 18 April. It was a legislature with greater formal autonomy than it had possessed before 1782, but it was not representative in a modern sense. Its members were drawn from a restricted Protestant political nation, shaped by property, patronage and borough influence; Roman Catholics remained excluded from parliament and from the parliamentary franchise. The lord lieutenant was George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, Marquess of Buckingham, who had returned as viceroy in November 1787. His administration governed through Dublin Castle while remaining closely connected to William Pitt’s ministry in London.
On 3 June, Lucas began publishing The Censor, or Citizens’ Journal in Dublin. Its title announced a purpose familiar in eighteenth-century political culture: to inspect, expose and judge public conduct. Lucas had already made himself prominent in the contested Dublin parliamentary election of 1748–49. He was not an aristocrat or a great landowner, but a practising apothecary with a talent for controversy, a command of civic records and an energetic use of pamphlets, addresses and newspapers. His appeal was principally to the city’s Protestant freemen and freeholders, men whose votes and municipal privileges mattered within the tightly restricted political system.
The Irish parliament met on 7 October 1735, beginning a session which continued until 30 March 1736. Its calendar-year opening matters. Ireland possessed a parliament in Dublin, but it was not a sovereign national legislature: under Poynings’ Law, prospective legislation passed through the Irish and English privy councils before it could return for enactment. The Lord Lieutenant, Lionel Sackville, Duke of Dorset, governed in the king’s interest; George II was monarch. Political authority therefore ran from Dublin Castle to London as well as through the Lords and Commons in Dublin.
