The period between the Kildare rebellion and the plantation of Ulster marks the final phase of a distinct political system. During these years the English administration in Ireland made strenuous efforts to reform Gaelic society. This paper aims to show that indigenous society was not inevitably doomed to submit before a superior Renaissance state. Indeed it proved flexible in responding to the challenge and was itself in the process of ‘modernisation’. This process was most marked in Ulster which was the strongest Gaelic region and the crown’s most intractable problem. The northern province was differentiated from the other Gaelic regions of Ireland by its political and physical geography. Ulster was an homogeneous cultural zone and contained the powerful polities of Tyrone, ruled by the O’Neills, and Tirconnell, ruled by the O’Donnells. Guarding the southern approaches of the province was a barrier of rough terrain interrupted by lakes and passes.

The repeal of much of the penal code in the final decades of the eighteenth century has often been seen as falling neatly into two phases — an initial series of moderate relief acts between 1774 and 1782 and a more radical and controversial phase in the 1790s, halted by the failure of Fitzwilliam’s attempt at a fundamental restructuring of the Irish system of government in 1795. The cautious and limited relief measures of the earlier phase of legislation possess a beguiling symmetry and simplicity when seen as finished pieces of legislation forming part of a series. The provision of an oath of loyalty designed for catholics in 1774 and the removal of the most restrictive parts of the laws preventing catholics from acquiring landed property in 1778 were complemented by the removal, in 1782, of most of the laws restricting catholic worship, education and the clergy. It is easy to establish a division between the removal of obsolete and almost unenforceable economic and religious restrictions in the first phase of relief and the much wider issues involved in challenging the exclusion of catholics from the legal profession, the army, the university, corporations, the franchise and parliament. Yet it would be a mistake to see the first phase of catholic relief as in any way inevitable in the period 1774–82. It is often argued — with considerable justice — that the Irish government’s conversion to catholic relief in the late 1770s was a direct result of decisions taken in Great Britain to reward and encourage the loyalty of English catholics at a time of crisis. An examination of the domestic politics surrounding the relief acts passed between 1774 and 1782 modifies this view considerably. Although the Irish government was decisively influenced by policies formed in London during the first phase of relief legislation, this was not true of the Irish parliament. Irish perspectives on the place of catholics in the state and on the extent of relief were very different from the British government’s viewpoint. This disparity had a considerable effect on the shape of the legislation which finally emerged, and even more on the proposals drawn up by Irish members of parliament actively involved in drafting the legislation affecting catholics.

The chronic factionalism and dissension which had plagued Irish nationalist politics after the fall of Parnell in 1890 was finally brought to an end with the reunion of the Irish parliamentary party in January 1900. During the 1890s the monolithic parliamentary movement of Parnell’s time had degenerated into three separate and warring factions. One of these factions, led for most of this period by John Dillon, consisted of the majority of those who had opposed Parnell’s continued leadership in 1890. A breakaway group of anti-Parnellites, led by T.M. Healy, had adopted both a clericalist and a localist position in relation to nationalist politics, thus separating themselves from the secular and centralised structure of the majority party. The third faction consisted of the supporters of Parnell, led by John Redmond, but by 1897 these Parnellites had split into two groups as a result of differences between Redmond and Harrington over the issue of reunion with the anti-Parnellites. With the formerly impressive edifice of parliamentary nationalism thus split into four fragments, and with two leaders in particular — Healy and Redmond — openly frustrating any moves towards reunion, most nationalists must have felt further than ever removed from the prospect of an effective, united political movement.

In July 1987, the private papers of Éamon de Valera relating to the drafting of the Irish constitution of 1937 were opened to the public for the first time. The purpose of this paper is to examine, in the light of this material, which is held in the Francisan House of Studies, Killiney, County Dublin, and of documents now available in the Irish Jesuit Archives, the contribution of a number of Jesuit priests to the drafting of this constitution.

On 24 May 1934, Éamon de Valera, president of the executive council, set up a committee of four civil servants to examine the Irish Free State constitution of 1922. Its membership consisted of Stephen Roche, secretary of the department of justice (committee chairman), Michael McDunphy, assistant secretary of the department of the president (committee secretary), Philip O’Donoghue, assistant to the attorney general, and John Hearne, legal adviser in the department of external affairs who, with de Valera, was to prove to be the principal architect of the 1937 constitution. It is clear from the minutes of this committee that its members were initially under the impression that what de Valera was seeking was a wholly new constitution. Thus, at its second meeting it was ‘agreed that the report of the committee should take the form of an entirely new constitution’. It soon became clear, however, ‘as a result of pronouncements by the president and of conversations which individual members of the committee had with him’, that what he really wanted was not a new constitution but ‘a selection within the framework of the present constitution of those articles which should be regarded as fundamental’ and ‘a recommendation as to how these should be rendered immune from alteration by ordinary legislation’.