The Great Charter of Ireland (also known as the Magna Charta Hiberniae) was an issue of the English Magna Carta, or Great Charter of Liberties in Ireland. King Henry III of England's Charter of 1216 was issued for Ireland on 12 November 1216 but not transmitted to Ireland until February 1217; it secured rights for the Anglo-Norman magnates in Ireland but not the Irish.[1] The Charter was reissued in 1217 as in England.
Although it was in effect the application of the Magna Carta to Ireland, with appropriate substitutions (such as "Dublin" for "London", and "Irish Church" for "Church of England"). In 1985 the singer Tommy Makem claimed that the English Magna Carta (and by implication the Great Charter of Ireland) also incorporated aspects of Brehon Law.[2]
The only known copy of the Charter was once to be found in the Red Book of the Dublin Court of Exchequer, an MS volume compiled in the fourteenth century. The Red Book was destroyed in the explosion at the Four Courts in Dublin, in 1922, but the Charter had been recorded by H. F. Berry in Early Statutes of Ireland (1907). The Great Charter of Ireland 1216 (1 Hen. 3) is now a retained statute under the Statute Law Revision Act 2007, s2.2(a) Schedule 1.