Several writers on Irish population in the pre-famine period have suggested that detailed local studies are urgently needed to supplement the evidence from national data, such as the early census returns or the hearth tax lists, and to assist in clarifying elusive problems such as age of marriage, size of family, death-rate changes etc. It is often asserted, however, that the amount of detailed information relating to specific areas is limited and of poor quality; in particular, contrasts are drawn between the availability and usefulness of parish registers relating to pre-famine Ireland and those available to scholars in England, France and Scandinavia. Pre-famine parochial registers of burials, marriages and baptisms do nonetheless exist, and, although their use poses problems, there are indications that a good deal of useful information may be waiting to be uncovered.

Acts of pains and penalties are an antique form of criminal action, related (but as a small brother, so to speak) to acts of attainder. Both consisted of bills directed against an individual, and passed by king, lords and commons, in contradistinction to impeachment, where the commons acted as accusers and the lords as sole judges in the case. Whereas, however, attainder was confined to cases of treason and felony and carried the death penalty, pains and penalties also covered conduct tending to grave public mischief and were attended by lesser punishments. The first acts of pains and penalties noticed in the legal textbooks belong to the thirteenth century, and generally concern fugitives domiciled abroad, the last belong to the 1720s and 1730s and cover a wide range of political or quasi-political offences. The Layers conspiracy, the South Sea Bubble scandal and the Porteous riots all ended in this form of punitive legislation.

By the beginning of 1880 the sitting parliament was entering its seventh session and a general election was expected before the year ended. Opinion varied on exactly when the government would dissolve. Some liberals believed that the dissolution would come in the spring after the budget had been presented, others thought it would take place in the summer following the completion of the parliamentary session, a few people even felt that the government might wait out its mandate and not dissolve until the end of the year, or the beginning of 1881. The dissolution ultimately came as a surprise on 8 March only a month after parliament had met and before any serious business had been transacted.

In October 1912, Alfred Stead, who had succeeded his father, the veteran journalist, W. T. Stead, as editor of the Review of Reviews, after the elder Stead’s death on the Titanic during the preceding April, found Stead’s memorandum of his interview with John Redmond, in December 1906, among his father’s papers. In view of the current crisis of the Irish home rule bill, Alfred Stead planned to publish the memorandum under the title ‘What Mr Redmond thought : special interview by Mr W. T. Stead’ in the November issue of the Review of Reviews, and on 7 October, posted page proof of the interview to Redmond with a note requesting Redmond to inform him ‘whether there are any points which are not in accord with … [his] … remembrance of this interview’.