ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the obscure Court of Admiralty of Ireland, received very elaborate treatment in the Act of Union: Article 8 included a provision that from and after the union there shall remain in Ireland an instance Court of Admiralty for the determination of causes civil and maritime only. It followed that the king could not exercise his prerogative in a way which enabled the exercise of power by the English Admiralty within the kingdom of Ireland. It also deals with the issue of whether the Irish court was competent to exercise prize jurisdiction. However, the resolutions of both the Irish and English parliaments approving the scheme for a Union, passed in March 1800, provided that from and after the Union. The question raised by the prize cases of the 1790s was whether, as some officers of the Irish court argued, the Irish Admiralty Court Act 1783 had conferred some form of prize jurisdiction on the Irish Court of Admiralty.
