Thirty years ago, at the time of the founding of Irish Historical Studies, there were available many books on the very much ‘ written ’ nineteenth century, but much of the work was biased and unscholarly, or lacked the freshness of question and approach which each genera¬tion must bring to the history it studies and writes. Good work there was, of course, and it is important that it be not forgotten. If there are errors in older books, equally grave ones can result from not reading earlier authors who often wrote from a closeness to the event, and with an awareness of factors easily forgotten in the ongoing sweep of interpretation.

Antrim was a ‘potwalloping’ borough. It had therefore no corporation nor any corporate function. By the terms of its charter of 1665 it existed simply to return two members to parliament, and this it continued to do till it was disfranchised by the act of the union in 1800. Its only borough official was the seneschal of the manor of Moylinny, who was appointed by the lord of that manor and acted as returning officer at borough of Antrim elections. The borough comprised, roughly speaking, the town and sixteen surrounding townlands of Antrim, known popularly as ‘Antrim and the sixteen towns’. The lord of its soil was the earl of Massereene, who, by a curious freak, was not lord of the manor of Moylinny. This lordship belonged to the earl of Donegall, to whom Lord Massereene also paid a chief rent for the Antrim estate. But because the interests of the two families had always been closely intertwined and had been drawn still closer together by marriage alliance in 1713, Lord Massereene had no difficulty in getting his nominee appointed seneschal of the manor, and in the period 1750–1800 the seneschal was invariably the receiver of the rents on his Antrim estate. The franchise in Antrim was vested by the charter in the inhabitants of the borough. It was limited by the election act of 1727 to the protestant inhabitants only, and further limited by the election act of 1795 to £5 householders, whether protestant or catholic. This was a drastic limitation, since up to then there had been no property qualification in the potwalloper type of franchise. The result in Antrim was an enormous fall in the number of voters. The second earl of Massereene estimated that the electorate prior to 1795 consisted of between 200 and 300 people, and of somewhere around 30 after that date. In 1801 there were 36 registered electors. Such was the constitution of Antrim borough. Although on the face of it simple enough, it was yet sufficiently complex to provide no less than five different parties with a claim to compensation for its disfranchisement in 1800.

‘ . . . I am as fast bound to Ireland as Ulysses was to his mast’: so Gladstone wrote near the close of his long career to the marquess of Ripon, one of the few liberal peers of high rank and great wealth who remained faithful to him when the party split over home rule in 1886. The remark, and the type of politician to whom it was addressed, are both significant. [Gladstone’s obsession, as many writers have termed it, with the Irish question came increasingly to dominate his political life during its latter, and much more important, half. The statement is often made that this ‘obsession’ held up the reform of British institutions for a generation or more, and in particular the social reforms of which an industrial and urban nation by then stood in grave need. This paper seeks to question the validity of that historical commonplace, for the following reasons.

In 1939, in his book Ulster and the British empire, Henry Harrison described partition as ‘a word of evil omen. . . It implies something resembling the surgical division of a living organism—a lopping off of limbs’. A writer on the partition of Ireland, Dr Denis Gwynn, condemned it as ‘so illogical, and so harmful in its results, that it cannot continue indefinitely’, and hinted that the imperial parliament ‘which devised and imposed the present partition’ should use ‘its influence and its authority to promote agreement’. This paper, however, makes no attempt to judge the morality of what was done in 1920, nor does it suggest a means of its undoing. It examines the attitude of British conservatives to what was known as the ‘Ulster question’ at three critical phases between 1912 and 1921, with special reference to the period after 1916, it deals with Anglo-Irish relations only as they affect this theme; and it attempts to show that, as far as British conservative opinion was concerned, the fate of Ulster, or of any part of Ulster, was always secondary to what were regarded as the interests of England and of the British empire.

The following list gives particulars of theses on Irish historical subjects, or on subjects having a distinct bearing on Irish history, which were successfully completed during 1969, or were in progress in January 1970, in the history departments of the universities of Ireland. The information has been supplied directly by the responsible supervisors or by the heads of departments.

The list is arranged in periods. Within each period subjects are placed in chronological order, those that extend over more than one period being entered under the first period to which they relate and cross-referenced under the second or later periods.