The Notary Public in Ireland — a working history

Further reading from this practice: Blockchain and Irish Law, Notary Public vs Commissioner for Oaths in Ireland. For Hugh's background and qualifications, see Hugh Phelan.

The office of Notary Public is older than the Irish state. It is older than the Reformation, older than the Tudor conquest, older than the establishment of the Irish legal profession in its modern form. The Roman-canonical roots of the notarial function reach back to the medieval Church and to the civil-law tradition that came with it. Ireland's continuous notarial practice begins with the arrival of Christianity and runs without break to the present day.

This is a working note on that history, and on what it means for a notary practising in Cork in 2026. It is not exhaustive — the literature on the European notariat fills shelves — but it sets out the connection between the medieval office and the modern one, which is more direct than most people assume.

Roman origins

The notarial function in its earliest form is Roman. The tabelliones of late imperial Rome were licensed scribes who drew up legal instruments for private parties, witnessed their execution, and kept records. The instruments they produced — wills, contracts, deeds — had probative force in Roman courts because of who had drawn them, not because of any oath sworn over them. The office was administrative; the authority was the product of training and licensure.

The Church inherited this function. In the early medieval period, the notarius attached to a bishop's court or a monastic scriptorium was the person who drew up the instruments by which the Church conducted its business — title to land, appointments to office, records of synods and councils. The Church's adoption of the office gave it ecclesiastical authority on top of the civil one, and the notarius apostolicus appointed by papal authority became a recognised figure across Christendom.

The medieval Irish notary

Irish notarial practice is documented from at least the twelfth century. The papal registers of the high medieval period contain Irish notarial instruments — confirmations of grants to monasteries, records of episcopal appointments, settlements of disputes — drawn by notaries who held papal authority. The Irish notary in this period was typically a cleric, trained in the canon law of the universities of Paris and Bologna, and operating within an ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

The instruments these notaries drew are among the most important surviving sources for medieval Irish history. They were written in Latin, sealed by the notary, and witnessed by named parties. The form was the same across Christendom and was recognised wherever the canon law ran. An Irish notary's instrument was relied upon in Rome, in Paris, in Salamanca, because the office was a European office and the Irish branch of it was no different from the others.

The Reformation and the survival of the office

The Reformation in England disestablished much of the medieval ecclesiastical apparatus, but the notarial office survived. The reason is partly that the office was already partly secular — many medieval English and Irish notaries were not in major orders, and many of the instruments they drew were of civil rather than ecclesiastical interest. The reason is also that the office was useful to the Tudor state, which needed an apparatus for authenticating documents for foreign use even as it broke with the Roman Church.

In England, the authority to appoint notaries passed from the papacy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, by the Ecclesiastical Licences Act 1533. The Faculty Office of the Archbishop continues to appoint English notaries to this day, with that authority running back unbroken to the medieval period. In Ireland, the position was more complicated, with the Church of Ireland claiming the appointing authority and the Roman Catholic tradition maintaining its own parallel notariat for ecclesiastical purposes.

The eventual settlement, formalised after the Act of Union of 1800 and refined in the nineteenth century, vested the appointing authority in the Crown's representative in Ireland and, after independence in 1922, in the head of the Irish judiciary. The Chief Justice of Ireland, with the President of the Supreme Court, appoints Irish notaries on petition, with the appointment for life. This is the current procedure.

The Faculty of Notaries Public in Ireland

The Faculty of Notaries Public in Ireland is the professional body that supervises and educates the Irish notariat. The Faculty was established by statute and royal charter in its modern form in the nineteenth century, has continued without interruption through the establishment of the Irish state, and operates today as the regulatory and educational body for notarial practice in the Republic.

The Faculty's Diploma in Notarial Law and Practice (Dip.Not.L.) is the qualification required for appointment as a Notary Public. The Diploma is a substantial postgraduate qualification covering Roman law, canon law, the law of notarial acts, conflicts of law, private international law, and the practice of cross-border authentication. The Diploma takes most candidates two years and is a serious commitment for any practising solicitor.

The Faculty also maintains the Code of Conduct of the Irish notariat, conducts disciplinary proceedings, publishes precedents and guidance, and engages with the Council of the Notariats of the European Union and the international notarial community. The Faculty's continuity through the political and ecclesiastical changes of the last several centuries is itself a small example of the office's resilience.

The Hague Convention and the modern era

The modern era of Irish notarial practice begins with the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents. Ireland acceded to the Convention in 1999, replacing the earlier chain of consular legalisation with the single apostille. The Convention is the legal foundation on which contemporary cross-border notarial practice rests.

The Convention did two things. First, it formalised the international recognition of notarial acts, by placing the notary's signature on the list of authorities whose signatures member states would accept on production of an apostille. Second, it accelerated the volume and the speed of cross-border notarial work, by removing the bottleneck of consular review.

The result, for an Irish notary working today, is that the office is more international than at any time since the medieval period. The instruments drawn in a Cork practice in 2026 travel to receiving jurisdictions on five continents. The form and the discipline of the work have changed less than one might expect — the notary's seal is still wax or embossed, the certificate is still in formal Latinate English, the apostille is still a paper instrument — but the volume and the reach are unrecognisable from a generation ago.

What the history means for practice

Three things follow from the history for a practising notary in 2026.

First, the office is older than the legal systems it serves. The notarial form was already a European form by the time Irish common law settled into its modern shape. The notary is, in some sense, a guest in the legal system rather than a creature of it. This explains why the notarial discipline can feel old-fashioned — why we still seal documents in wax, why we still keep registers by hand, why we still draft certificates in language that has been used for several centuries. The continuity is the point.

Second, the office is international by design. An Irish notarial act is intended to be relied upon outside Ireland, and the form has been refined over centuries to be recognisable across borders. The modern apostille is a twentieth-century overlay on an office that was already cross-border in the medieval period.

Third, the office adapts. The medieval notary working from a bishop's court would not recognise the practice of a twenty-first-century notary working on a digital-asset transaction. But the discipline — authenticate carefully, record contemporaneously, preserve evidence, refuse where doubt arises — is the same. The current debates within the profession about electronic notarial acts and post-quantum cryptographic signatures are the latest iteration of an adaptation the office has performed many times before.

For a closely related working note on what an Irish notary does in current practice, see what is a Notary Public in Cork. To book a notarial appointment with Hugh Phelan, call (021) 489-7134 or visit phelansolicitors.com.