Newtown Act

2 c. 10 (I)) was an act of the Parliament of Ireland regulating municipal corporations, in particular the manner in which parliamentary boroughs elected members to the Irish House of Commons.

Clauses 1 to 7 aimed to curtail faggot voters by requiring a rentcharge property qualification for the franchise to be either over ten pounds or else held for over one year prior to the election.

The 1835 Report of the Commissioners on Municipal Corporations in Ireland questioned whether it was applicable in the case of Armagh and Tuam, both being episcopal sees and hence "cities" in William Blackstone's definition in Commentaries on the Laws of England.

The act's negative reputation is ascribed by A. P. W. Malcomson to James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont, who called it "the most outrageous and unconstitutional that ever was enacted" in his 1783 memoirs, which present clause 8 as instigated by Stewart solely to win his court case.

William Lynch in 1831 was also critical, stating that all ancient boroughs in Ireland were de jure potwallopers, under the common law as "enforced by the statutes of 10th Hen.

[10] Malcomson argues that Charlemont's account is coloured by political bias and that clause 8 was "only simplifying and making more intelligible the legal position as it already stood".

Malcomson accepts the court case as the motivation for clause 8, but suggests that MPs were not acting in Stewart's particular interest but from "dread and uncertainty" of a decision's effect on their own constituency.

The allowance of non-resident burgesses has been presented as a worsening of the Irish House of Commons' unrepresentativeness, and as intended solely to increase the hold of patrons over their boroughs.

The act's guarantee of the franchise to non-residents resulted in a transfer of power from the local gentry and bourgeois to the larger regional landholders.