ABSTRACT
Except for Charles Francis, Irish political economists wrote little of lasting merit in the area of public finance. Sir Henry Parnell’s On Financial Reform is one of the most important contributions from the earlier part of the nineteenth century. It is firmly within the classical tradition in dealing with public finance, starting from the position that there were essentially four principal sources of state revenue: taxation, national debt, state property, and state enterprise. Taxation was clearly regarded as the major source of revenue and most attention was directed to the analysis of this topic. Adam Smith’s four maxims of taxation, equality, convenience, certainty, and economy of collection, provided the central point of departure for most analyses in the classical period. The most celebrated work in public finance produced in Ireland in the nineteenth century came from the pen of Bastable, who held professorships in Queen’s College Galway and Trinity College Dublin.
