"Your Committee," observe the Select Committee of the House of Commons of 1817,[257] "beg leave to call the attention of the House to the detailed opinion expressed by the governors of the Richmond Asylum, that the only mode of effectual relief will be found in the formation of district asylums, exclusively appropriated to the reception of the insane." It appeared that, with the exception of the Dublin institution, that at Cork, and one at Tipperary, there was not provision made for more than one hundred lunatics throughout the whole of Ireland. The Committee proposed that, in addition to the asylums in Dublin and Cork, there should be built four or five additional asylums, capable of containing a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty lunatics each. They recommended that powers should be given to the Government to divide Ireland into districts, and that the expense should be borne by the counties included within the several districts. The consequence of this Report was the Act 57 Geo. III., c. 136,[258] afterwards repealed, but re-enacted with amendments by the 1 and 2 Geo. IV., c. 33; 6 Geo. IV., c. 54; and 7 Geo. IV., c. 14. These statutes enacted that the cost of asylums, advanced from the Consolidated Fund, was to be ultimately paid by the counties; that all the principal officers were to be appointed by the Lord Lieutenant, the general superintendence being vested in a Board of Commissioners, named by the Government but acting gratuitously; that the asylums should be brought under the annual review of the inspectors-general of prisons by the 7 Geo. V., c. 74, and should be noticed in the reports submitted annually to Parliament. The inspectors-general had power to enter private as well as public asylums.