The 1560s and 1570s saw the development of a new technique to meet the problem of governing Ireland: the establishment of provincial presidencies in Connacht and Munster, with composition agreements to finance these presidencies. This article re-examines the evidence for, and the nature of, the Connacht composition agreements, with particular reference to the lordships of Clanricard and Thomond, and analyses native reaction to the composition. It places the composition within the context of contemporary arguments about reform strategies for Ireland, and, finally, illustrates that the Composition of Connacht was essentially a form of taxation, and not, as historians have traditionally suggested, an agreement dealing with title to land.

English administrative policy in Elizabethan Ireland was influenced by the success of the provincial administrations of Wales and the north of England. This is most clearly reflected in the establishment of provincial presidencies in Connacht and Munster in 1569–70. The driving force behind English schemes for the administration of both provinces was Sir Henry Sidney, a former president of Wales, and lord deputy of Ireland, 1565–71 and 1575–78.

Historians of any pre-industrial society, such as early seventeenth-century Ireland, must devote the bulk of their energies to the study of the rural world. Rural society, however, cannot be studied in isolation without a serious distortion of the reality of the social structure, since the urban element, although subsidiary, was nevertheless an important feature of pre-industrial society. There are, however, considerable problems in studying urban history in early modern Ulster since the sources can only be described as meagre. The basic sources used by many English early modern urban historians, the corporation records, are missing for all but a few Ulster towns. Only Belfast and Carrickfergus have corporation books for the pre-1641 period. The dearth of other important sources, such as freemen's rolls, means that areas of human activity such as the occupational structure of Ulster towns cannot be demonstrated with the accuracy that English early modern historians have been able to attain. Nor will it be possible to chart the detail of the day-to-day administrative or political structures of towns. Topics such as local elections, the minutiae of poor relief, and law and order must remain relatively shadowy This is not to argue that the history of the Ulster town cannot be written. The work of R. J. Hunter has demonstrated that it is possible by using fragments of central government and local records not only to reconstruct the administrative context of the establishment of towns but also to discover the social, economic, and political structures of individual towns. Ulster towns are among the better documented principal towns in Ireland for the early modern period. The interest of central government in the development of the plantation produced a number of surveys which shed considerable light on urban development. Indeed two of the principal towns in Ulster, Coleraine and Derry, are well documented because of the disputes which surrounded the activities of their developers, the Irish Society, and a rival planter, Sir Thomas Phillips. Ulster also provides an important case study in urbanisation since it contained an older pre-seventeenth-century urban network which was expanded and developed as part of both the informal colonisation and the more formal plantation scheme in Ulster. It is the aim of this paper to examine the development of this new urban network.

One indication of Ireland's divided political culture is that there is no general agreement between most catholics and most protestants on a single set of national symbols. To take the case of a national festival, in the Republic of Ireland, where ninety-four per cent of the population is catholic, St Patrick's day (17 March) is celebrated at the popular level, the state level, and is a bank holiday. In Northern Ireland too St Patrick's day is celebrated, but chiefly by catholics (thirty-one per cent of the population), while the festival associated with the majority protestant population is Orangemen's day (12 July) when William III's victory at the battle of the Boyne(l July 1690 O.S.) is commemorated. Both these festivals are kept as bank holidays in Northern Ireland (though not in the rest of the United Kingdom); the Republic of Ireland, however, extends no recognition to 12 July.

Gerald Balfour's appointment as chief secretary for Ireland on 4 July 1895 was as unexpected as it was intriguing. Recording the event in his diary Sir Edward Hamilton, Gladstone's former private secretary and now assistant financial secretary to the Treasury, described it as ‘quite a surprise and a considerable experiment’, and the Carlton Club, noted more for its relentless suspicion of Irish chief secretaries than its welcoming of surprises and experiments, grumbled ominously. After all Gerald Balfour had led an uneventful academic life at Cambridge followed by a back-bench career in the house of commons that had proved neither prominent nor promising, and he clearly owed his new position to the support of his illustrious brother, Arthur, and the unbridled nepotism of his uncle, Lord Salisbury, the prime minister. Like his avuncular patron, he soon developed a weakness for ‘blazing indiscretion’ and in his first major policy speech to his Leeds constituents after his election he spoke of ‘killing home rule with kindness’ This rather glib phrase provoked a furore among the Irish nationalists and aroused the scepticism of many Irish unionists, though, as Gerald Balfour subsequently protested, he was merely echoing the strategy his brother had pursued with full unionist support in the 1880s.

The Commonwealth Labour Party (Northern Ireland), hereafter referred to as the C.L.P., came into existence on 19 December 1942. Its birth was the result of a split in the ranks of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (N.I.L.P.). This split centred on the personality and the political outlook of the man who had led the N.I.L.P since 1932, and who was to be leader of the C.L.P during its five-year lifespan: Harry Midgley.

Midgley (1892-1957) was, by the time of the formation of the C.L.P., one of the best-known and most controversial politicians in Northern Ireland. Born into a working-class protestant home in north Belfast, he acquired an early political education as a youth through the medium of the Independent Labour Party organisation in the city. He was close, at least initially, to William Walker, the most outstanding labour leader produced by the north of Ireland during the early troubled years of the labour movement. In addition, he met and listened to some of the most eminent spokesmen of British labour, most notably Keir Hardie. Midgley served his time as a joiner in the Workman Clark shipyard (where his father was a labourer) before spending a brief period in America in 1913 and 1914. After serving in the Ulster division in the First World War, he returned to Belfast in 1919 and quickly got himself a job as a trade-union organiser with the Linenlappers’ Union.