With this issue of Irish Historical Studies we complete our thirtieth year of publication. Among other ways of marking the occasion, as announced in our last issue, a series of survey-articles has been planned, assessing the contribution of the past thirty years to the historiography of Ireland. Three of these articles appear below. The series is to be completed in five further articles dealing with Ireland before the Norman invasion, sixteenth-century Ireland (1485–1603), nineteenth-century Ireland (1800–1914), Ireland since 1914, and, finally, Irish history generally.

The seventeenth century was a period of great changes in Ireland. There were successive transfers of land from catholic to protestant ownership; political and administrative power passed into the hands of a ‘new English’ minority. Two major attempts to reverse these trends—the confederate and Jacobite wars—proved disastrous for those who supported the legitimate monarchy. The catholic church was for much of the period on the defensive, and at the end of the century was subjected to severe legal restraints. The Irish economy was seriously affected by two wars, and the resilience that it showed in the intervals was limited by the requirements of English commercial policy.

Those who wish to put together the complete picture and story of eighteenth-century Ireland, in so far as these have been assembled in the literature of the last thirty years, will need to study many writings that lie on the periphery of the subject, or at least outside the main historiographical tradition. The scholarship seems to exist in separate layers which sometimes touch one another without quite interpenetrating; and a man may make a genuine contribution in his own field but still require to be read with a special critical alertness because he is unaware of what is happening in other fields. Important items may appear in periodicals not regularly consulted by historians.

The political significance of the counter-reformation papacy has continued to occupy the attention of historians ever since Ranke drew attention to it in his History of the popes during the last four centuries, first written in 1834–6 and revised slightly seven years later. Von Pastor, writing on the papacy at the end of the last century, had access to the Vatican archives and he places the political activities of the counter-reformation papacy in the general setting of post-Tridentine papal policy. His work thus acts as a corrective to that of Ranke.

The Maynooth question, which occupied so much public attention in 1845—which Harriet Martineau remarked was ‘the great political controversy of the year, the subject on which society seemed to be going mad’—in fact comprised several issues of unequal significance. As a political question, it lurched the conservative party to the point of grave division; it was a dress-rehearsal for the corn law split in the following year. It was also an incident in the Irish policy of the great Peel ministry, a part of the general reconstitution of higher education in Ireland, and an attempt, together with the charitable bequests act and the creation of the Queen’s Colleges, to conciliate moderate catholic opinion and syphon off some quantity of O’Connell’s abundant support.

During the four decades that followed the great famine, over three million people born in Ireland emigrated to the U.S.A. In the seventies and eighties these Irish-Americans and their descendants played a distinct role in Irish politics. The period was a critical era in the history of Ireland. It was marked by the beginnings of Gladstone’s ‘mission to pacify Ireland’ and of the home-rule movement under Butt; by the ‘land war’ of 1879–82, when the tenant farmers, under the leadership of Parnell and Davitt, offered a successful massresistance to the landlords; by the unchallenged ascendancy of Parnell and his party in national politics for the next eight years; and by the transformation of the conditions of the Anglo-Irish conflict through the conversion of Gladstone and the British liberal party to home rule.

When the American Historical Association met in Washington, D.C., in December 1958, Thomas N. Brown, Gilbert Cahill, Emmet Larkin, and I discussed the difficulty of initiating and maintaining contacts between the relatively small number of people working in Irish history scattered over the United States and Canada. We decided that an American committee for Irish historical studies might help solve these problems of numbers and distance and encourage research and writing in Irish history.