This paper has been prompted by two recent articles in Irish Historical Studies. Both are by distinguished historians from outside Ireland — Professor Michael Richter from Germany (to which he has recently returned) and Dr Steven G. Ellis from England — who have spent many years teaching in the history departments of University College, Dublin, and University College, Galway, respectively. Their different backgrounds and experiences enable them to bring fresh perspectives to bear upon the history of medieval Ireland and have led them to question some traditional assumptions about the Irish past. Here I should confess that coming as I do from Northern Ireland I am something of an outsider myself, and my own origin and background must inevitably influence my interpretation of the past.

Professor Richter took the opportunity granted by a review of an important collection of essays to challenge ‘the unquestioned assumption that the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland marked a turning point in Irish history’. Arguing that the event should be seen in a wider context, both geographical and chronological, he suggested that a close parallel to the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland is provided by the German expansion into western Slav territories and that a comparison with the Scandinavian impact in the three centuries prior to 1169 would help to get the importance of the English in medieval Ireland into perspective.

The document commonly known as the ‘Remonstrance of the Irish princes’, which was sent to Pope John XXII in or about 1317, has inspired a great deal of written comment since the text first became generally available during the nineteenth century. It has been seen as an early statement and vindication of Irish national identity and political independence; it throws light on the application of the English common law in early fourteenth-century Ireland; it illustrates the relations between English and Irish monks and secular clergy within the Irish church; it demonstrates that in the early fourteenth century Pope Adrian IV’s bull Laudabiliter, in which he had urged Henry II of England to conquer Ireland, was regarded even by enemies of the English as a key element in the English monarchy’s claims to the lordship of Ireland; and its account of the English settlers in Ireland has been used to demonstrate a growing distinction between them and their cousins in England. In recent years the remonstrance has also been quarried for evidence on the application of the canon law of the just war, and for information on racial attitudes on the frontiers of medieval Europe.

As J.G. Simms remarked more than thirty years ago in the introduction to his notable book on the subject, ‘the Williamite confiscation was the last of a series which in the course of a century and a half changed the ownership of the greater part of Ireland’. The Williamite confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 was a landmark in the complicated and, till then, much misunderstood history of the subject. In fact, and rather oddly considering the importance of the war of 1689–91 and its consequences, there was no earlier detailed account of the confiscation of Irish land that followed the defeat of the Jacobites at the Boyne, Aughrim, and Limerick; and most references to it were based upon the printed report of the parliamentary commissioners of 1699, in some important respects a highly tendentious and misleading document. Simms based his work upon manuscript sources not previously used: the detailed records of the 1699 commissioners; the records of the forfeiture trustees who succeeded them; and the Books of Survey and Distribution that recorded the ownership of Irish land and its redistribution during the years after 1641. His main general conclusions —

— have provided all later students of the subject with a firm frame of reference within which to examine the details of the settlement.

The six months following the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 saw an appalling level of violence in Belfast and on the border, which threatened the stability of the newly formed Northern Ireland government. Official figures for the period between 6 December 1921 and 31 May 1922 listed seventy-three protestants and 147 catholics killed in Belfast and eight protestants and twenty-two catholics killed in the six counties outside Belfast. In that period two wide-ranging agreements aimed to reform the northern government and security system: they became known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Craig-Collins pacts, of 21 January and 30 March 1922. This article discusses the motivation behind the pacts and the reasons for their failure in a wide context, by giving equal weight to the attitudes of the British government and to opinion on both sides of the Irish border.

The Northern Ireland government was established in 1920–21. It was unrecognised by the dáil government in the south and by much of the northern catholic minority. The province developed against a background of violence and upheaval, including the expulsion of catholic shipyard workers from their work in the summer of 1920; the dáil retaliated by boycotting Belfast goods. The period also saw increasing I.R.A. activity in the north during the latter stages of the Anglo-Irish war, and the five-month truce that followed it. Though the northern government was not a party to the treaty negotiations, only reluctantly accepting the granting of dominion status to the south, the months before and after the settlement greatly increased tensions in the north-east.