Inheriting the Royals: Royal Chartered Bodies in Ireland after 1922

The establishment of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) in 1922 did not occur on a blank canvas. A slew of administrative bodies and agencies with pre-1922 origins now found themselves under a new jurisdiction, still familiar in some respects but alien in others. The Irish State Administration Database (ISAD) indicates that the functions performed by these pre-1922 bodies ranged from the delivery of specific services to sectoral regulation. The resilience of pre-1922 bodies arguably ensured a greater degree of day-to-day administrative continuity and stability after 1922 than may otherwise have been the case.This paper focuses on a particular subset of these pre-1922 entities - royal chartered bodies - carried into Saorstát Éireann and beyond. Of special interest are the peculiar legal mechanisms through which these bodies were sustained in an altered constitutional landscape. The discontinuation, at least explicitly, of a pre-1922 royal prerogative to grant and amend royal charters presented legal conundrums for royal chartered bodies and the State. These conundrums were mitigated by a mixture of tailored public and private legislation of the Oireachtas. These dynamics are interrogated through the lenses of temporality and legal pluralism. Post-1922 Irish Governments sought an accommodation with royal chartered bodies, themselves conceived under a variant common law system predating the emergent Irish State. Faced with a temporal collision between alternative conceptions of common law authority rooted in different moments in time, the State ultimately chose to co-opt royal chartered bodies. It is argued here that this was achieved by transitioning royal chartered bodies to the legal timeline of the new State. The success of this operation is attested by the fact that a number of these bodies remain important today in discharging functions with public impacts. These dynamics are amplified using a case study of a particular royal chartered body, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland.