The Desmond rebellion was one of the most brutal military conflicts to have taken place in Ireland in the sixteenth century. Initiated by James FitzMaurice Fitzgerald, cousin of Gerald, fifteenth earl of Desmond, in July 1579 in order to restore the Catholic faith in Ireland, the rebellion quickly developed from the landing of a small expeditionary force of approximately sixty men into a bloody contest which engulfed Munster for four and a half years. The rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful, but such was the ferocity of the conflict that it had a profound and devastating impact on Munster. The social and economic consequences were immense, for it exacted a huge economic cost on the province, both in terms of physical destruction and lost economic activity, and produced a very substantial depopulation of the province. The result was the overthrow and destruction of the traditional social order in Munster, an act that paved the way for the subsequent Munster plantation.

In January 1649, after the conclusion of the second peace treaty between James Butler, marquis of Ormond, the king’s intermediary, and representatives of the Confederate Catholics, Ormond addressed the General Assembly in Kilkenny: ‘There is a door, and that a large one, not left, but purposely set open, to give you entrance by your future merits to whatsoever of honour or other advantage you can reasonably wish.’ The treaty was signed on 17 January; thirteen days later, Charles I was executed. The ‘door’ of opportunity for Irish Catholics was firmly shut.

Many historians have noted the symbolic role the veteran Fenian and 1916 proclamation signatory, Thomas J. Clarke, played as a ‘living link’ between the neo-Fenians of Easter 1916 and the previous generation of Irish revolutionaries. However, before 1914 the neo-Fenian claim to the revolutionary nationalist tradition was by no means unchallenged. For constitutional nationalists also claimed the legacy of the ‘men of ’67’. Although this now seems most implausible, at the time it was much more convincing, not least because of the presence of so many former Fenians in the Irish Parliamentary Party. In 1887 the R.I.C. estimated that 23 of the 83 Parnellite M.P.s had been Fenians before entering parliament. Paul Bew has argued that their presence influenced the ‘ideological tone’ of Parnellism, bringing an admiration for armed insurrection which, though emphasising its inexpediency, also stressed its nobility and heroic qualities.

Writing some years after the events he was describing, Michael Cusack, the first secretary of the Gaelic Athletic Association, suggested that in its early years the ‘Association swept the country like a prairie fire’. This is perhaps a little exaggerated, but its success was striking. Eighteen months after its foundation the G.A.A. was reckoned to have 50,000 individual members. Six months later there were around 400 affiliated clubs. The relative success of the G.A.A. is particularly apparent when its progress is compared with that of two of its rival organisations. The Irish Football Association was founded in 1880. Ten years later only 124 clubs had affiliated to it. By the same date the G.A.A., founded in 1884, had 875 member clubs.

In his pamphlet The independence of Iceland: a parallel for Ireland, published in June 1921, Alexander McGill, a Scotsman of Irish descent, argued that Irish nationalists could learn salutary lessons from the history of the people of Iceland, not least from their pertinacity, since the Icelanders had never wavered in their demands for independence from the kingdom of Denmark. McGill went so far as to say that Icelandic history could be used to justify the strategy of Irish nationalists, who were at the time making a last stand in their bloody and violent war of independence. ‘Iceland is a small land, but a very interesting one, and her people understand Ireland’s demands and rights. She understands the problem of the Irish people, because Iceland as a nation has been evolved from similar beginnings.’