Category talk:Members of the Irish House of Lords

Scope

What if someone held a peerage at some interval between 1264 and 1800 during which no parliament was summoned? There were many such long gaps, see List of Parliaments of Ireland. It's not clear whether such a peer could be called a member of the House of Lords; did the House of Lords exist in abeyance? jnestorius^(talk) 11:53, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

I see conversely in

• Malcomson, A.P.W. (2002). "THE IRISH PEERAGE AND THE ACT OF UNION, 1800–1971". Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 10: 289–327. doi:10.1017/S0080440100000141. ISSN 0080-4401.

From [the the late thirteenth century] until the early seventeenth century, because men who were neither temporal nor spiritual peers attended the House of Lords (though in decreasingly significant numbers) by virtue of a writ of summons only, the House of Lords was a larger body than the Irish peerage. Thereafter, due to the number of non-Irishmen and/or non-residents who were created Irish peers, the House of Lords became the smaller body, because such people seldom or never attended.

The first sentence [emphasis added] is very interesting to me. Does it refer only to a writ of acceleration or were there other non-peer attendees? Regarding the second sentence, I suppose it has been as true for the English/British House of Lords as the Irish that many peers never bothered to show up; such people unquestionably remain members of the House just as much as an abstentionist MP is a member of the Commons.