It is ironic that in Ireland, a country which has witnessed some of the most successful catholic-inspired crusades against alcohol consumption, the catholic church cannot be said to have been particularly favourably inclined towards the temperance movement. The Irish protestant churches and the catholic church in countries like the United States of America, England and Australia (where its membership was largely Irish) were far more forthright and consistent in their support for temperance than was the catholic church in Ireland itself. The Irish church’s ambivalent attitude to the anti-drink movement sprang from a variety of sources, some related to the nature of Irish society, others to the nature of the Irish temperance movement. To elucidate the church’s attitude and the reasons for its hostility to the anti-drink movement, I shall in this paper examine the development of the catholic temperance movement in Ireland from Father Mathew’s crusade in the 1840s to the rise of the Pioneer Total Abstinence League of the Sacred Heart in the 1890s.

In the general election of January 1906, R. G. Glendinning, a taciturn baptist linen manufacturer of Belfast, won the North Antrim parliamentary seat. The significance of this event was his success in an overwhelmingly protestant constituency at the expense of the highly articulate and intelligent unionist sitting member, William Moore, the principal architect of the Ulster Unionist Council and the leader of the unionist campaign to expose the devolutionary dangers of ‘Macdonnellism’. Furthermore Glendinning had campaigned as a ‘liberal unionist’, but had been condemned as a home ruler by his opponent and indeed upon arrival in the house of commons took his seat on the liberal government benches. Some years later, in 1913, despite the heightened political temperature, it was still possible for a meeting on 24 October in Ballymoney town hall attended by some four or five hundred protestants to denounce ‘the lawless policy of Carsonism’, and for this same meeting to be addressed by such noted nationalists as Captain Jack White, Sir Roger Casement and Mrs Alice Stopford Green. Their audience was invited to sign an anti-covenant devised by White and closely modelled on, though directly opposed to, the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant. As late as 1925 an independent protestant candidate, George Henderson, representing the Unbought Tenants Association, secured one of the seven County Antrim seats in the Northern Ireland parliament, thus preventing the election of an official unionist, R. D. Megaw. Then there is the interesting phenomenon of the Independent Orange Order which in the years before 1914 had established itself more firmly in north Antrim than anywhere else. The area also threw up in this period a number of prominent individuals who became active in non-unionist politics, of whom the Reverend J. B. Armour, the Reverend D. D. Boyle, John Pinkerton and Samuel Craig McElroy are perhaps the best known. Finally Bally money and the Route was the epicentre of the Ulster tenant-right movement in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The Irish question, in one form or another, became a feature of American public life from the period of the great Irish migration to the United States in the 1840s to the twentieth century. Seemingly each generation saw a version of the Irish struggle for self-government played out in both Ireland and America. By 1920 this struggle, in the shape of the War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War, had assumed dramatic proportions.

Many Irish-Americans, anxious to assist and support the nationalist movement in Ireland, resumed their traditional role of raising money for Ireland and attempting to influence the American government to intercede in some way on Ireland’s behalf. In 1919 Eamon de Valera, president of Dáil Íireann, went to the United States to further these objectives. However, serious rifts developed within the leadership of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States which caused Irish-Americans to divide into several hostile groups. The result was that during the summer and autumn of 1920, when crown forces in Ireland were escalating their military campaign, the Irish-American nationalist movement was largely ineffectual.

The study of Irish historical demography has long been an area of complexity and controversy; and the further back into the past the search for patterns and trends is pushed, the more the problems multiply. Much of the difficulty stems from the inadequacy and/or variability of the available sources. Hearth-tax returns, enumeration lists of various types, estate records and registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, all pose problems of interpretation and in addition, for any single area, they are likely to provide only fragmentary and discontinuous evidence. $$Largely because of these difficulties, only a limited number of detailed analyses of population patterns in specific areas as far back as the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century have been attempted. Yet at the same time the work which has been done has made it apparent both that this is a crucial period in terms of demographic history and that only detailed case studies can provide the evidence necessary to enlarge upon our current very general understanding.

In June 1926 Herbert Wood, deputy-keeper of the public records of Ireland, read a paper to the Royal Irish Academy under the title ‘Letter from Domnall O’Neill to Fineen MacCarthy, 1317’, based on a manuscript (Add. MS 34727, ff 268–9) in the British Museum. The paper was published shortly afterwards as an interesting — perhaps unique — example of a personal communication from one Gaelic lord to another in the era of the Bruce wars. Wood, who obviously had some doubts concerning it, debated in his final paragraphs the case for and against the possibility of forgery before accepting the letter as genuine. But despite the singularity of the letter and the circumstances of its provenance through one person — Thomas O’Sullivan of Middle Temple, London — it has been unquestioningly accepted by historians both general and specialist.

Since 1926 several contemporary and near-contemporary sources of early MacCarthy history have been published, providing evidence which was not readily accessible in Wood’s time. In the light of sources such as these, the authenticity of the letter deserves to be reassessed, and the purpose of this article is to show that the whole document could well have been a fabrication concocted by O’Sullivan.