The most resounding charge brought during the last two decades against ‘revisionism’ in Irish historiography has been that of a tacit collaboration between historians and the government. This accusation is too serious to be left unexamined. Traditionalists have denounced ‘revisionism’ as a dubious device designed to prop up the border and undo the work of the revolution. Desmond Fennell declared categorically that ‘Both in its ultimate thrust, and as a matter of objective fact, [it] is the historiography of the counter-revolution.’ Séamus Deane defined it as ‘a provincial phenomenon’ and dismissed its practitioners as ‘neo-unionists’.

At the time of the Norman invasion the Irish church under its primate, Gilla Mac Liag or Gelasius, had welcomed the advent of Henry II and accepted his claim to be an ecclesiastical reformer. As a result the invaders, while ensuring that English or French clerics controlled the church in the areas they themselves had colonised, did not interfere with the primacy of all Ireland at Armagh. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the coarbship of Patrick was held in turn by ten primates of native Irish stock, a German, an Italian and only one Anglo-Norman, Luke Netterville, freely elected in 1217.

The three main opposition groups in Ireland facing Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, in 1640 were the Old English, the New English and the Ulster-Scots. All three groups had grievances over land and religion, but it was the religious issue which was primarily responsible for bringing the lord lieutenant into conflict with the Ulster-Scots. Because Charles I had a dispute with his subjects in Scotland, because the Ulster-Scots maintained close contact with their homeland and because of Ulster's close proximity to Scotland, the quarrel between Wentworth and the Scottish settlers in the north of Ireland gained a significance which transcended Irish politics. No major rebellion broke out in Ulster during the bishops’ wars, yet much of Wentworth's policy towards the Ulster-Scots during this period can, at best, be regarded as ill-advised. This paper will attempt to show how this policy developed and why it was misguided.

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.

Agricultural co-operative societies were widely discussed across late nineteenth-century Europe as a potential solution to the problems of agricultural depression, land reform and rural poverty. In Finland, the agronomist Hannes Gebhard drew inspiration from examples across Europe in founding the Pellervo Society, to promote rural cooperation, in 1899. He noted that Ireland’s ‘tragic history’, its struggle for national self-determination and the introduction of co-operative dairies to tackle rural poverty, seemed to offer a useful example for Finnish reformers. This article explores the exchanges between Irish and Finnish co-operators around the turn of the century, and examines the ways in which the parallels between the two countries were constructed and presented by those involved in these exchanges. I will also consider the reasons for the divergence in the development of cooperation, so that even before the First World War it was Finland, not Ireland, that had begun to be regarded as ‘a model co-operative country’.

The six months following the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 saw an appalling level of violence in Belfast and on the border, which threatened the stability of the newly formed Northern Ireland government. Official figures for the period between 6 December 1921 and 31 May 1922 listed seventy-three protestants and 147 catholics killed in Belfast and eight protestants and twenty-two catholics killed in the six counties outside Belfast. In that period two wide-ranging agreements aimed to reform the northern government and security system: they became known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Craig-Collins pacts, of 21 January and 30 March 1922. This article discusses the motivation behind the pacts and the reasons for their failure in a wide context, by giving equal weight to the attitudes of the British government and to opinion on both sides of the Irish border.

The Northern Ireland government was established in 1920–21. It was unrecognised by the dáil government in the south and by much of the northern catholic minority. The province developed against a background of violence and upheaval, including the expulsion of catholic shipyard workers from their work in the summer of 1920; the dáil retaliated by boycotting Belfast goods. The period also saw increasing I.R.A. activity in the north during the latter stages of the Anglo-Irish war, and the five-month truce that followed it. Though the northern government was not a party to the treaty negotiations, only reluctantly accepting the granting of dominion status to the south, the months before and after the settlement greatly increased tensions in the north-east.

The Betting Act 1926 legalised cash betting in Ireland and led to the appearance, for the first time, of the legally regulated and licensed betting office. The introduction of this legislation was a pragmatic step, designed to eradicate the undesirable practice of street bookmaking. This article seeks to examine the operation of the legislation over the entire period of its enactment before it was superseded by the Betting Act 1931. What follows focuses on the bookmaker, their social background, geographical distribution, clientele and business practices. The industry, as it made its transition from its illegal to regulated forms, was characterised by both continuity and change. How bookmakers were perceived in the context of the puritanical atmosphere of the Free State is also considered. Attitudes to bookmakers depended on the scale of their involvement in the business, where they conducted their business, and who they conducted it with. Debates featuring these issues were spliced with contemporary concerns about class, gender and youth.

The reign of George I has long been regarded by historians as an important period in the development in Ireland of what some have called ‘colonial nationalism’. This period witnessed, after all, two long-drawn-out conflicts between the political establishments of Ireland and Britain—the Sherlock v. Annesley case (leading to the Declaratory Act of 1720) and the infamous Wood’s Halfpence dispute of 1723–5. This reign has traditionally been regarded as a ‘difficult’ transitional phase in Anglo-Irish relations which was followed by the superficially uneventful era of government by ‘undertakers’ after the early 1730s, before the ‘national’ question erupted again during the money bill dispute of the 1750s. This article will examine the nature of the anti-English feeling which undoubtedly existed at this time among certain sections of the Irish Protestant community. It will be argued that conflict within the episcopate of the Church of Ireland had a significant role in fomenting much of the ‘national’ tension between the so-called Irish and English interests at this time. It will be suggested, moreover, that disputes over the distribution of ecclesiastical patronage made a major contribution to the development of this conflict.

Christine Kinealy has claimed that ‘more has been written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine than was written in the whole period since 1850’. This is probably true. Anniversaries of major historical events now give rise to commemorative events ranging from scholarly conferences to the unveiling of memorial plaques, even to pop concerts. There appears to be a premium on being first in the field, and a corresponding waning of interest as attention shifts to the next anniversary. Harvard University organised its conference marking the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1988. The summer of 1847 was taken as the cutoff point for the Irish government’s official commemoration of the Famine, in order to make way for the bicentenary of 1798, despite the fact that a majority of famine victims probably died after that date. Commemorating historical events boosts book sales, and publishers appear eager to respond to popular demand. Unfortunately the interest may prove too short-lived to afford time for major research, and many of the resulting books either recycle existing material or give the appearance of being in need of further work.

It was in 1872 that English agricultural labourers formed their first nationally organised trade union, and with this development came immediate pressure to secure improved wages and reduced hours of employment, wherever possible. In such circumstances unionists were clearly anxious to create a general scarcity of labour, in order to strengthen their bargaining position, and they particularly frowned upon the itinerant Irish workers who came to swell the agricultural market during the hay and corn harvests. Although, from the farmers' point of view, extra labour was clearly needed at these busy seasons of the year, the farm workers themselves were keen to eliminate—or at least to regulate—this type of competition.

In practice the Irish harvest migration had probably already reached its peak by the end of the 1840s and had then fallen off fairly rapidly, in the face of the massive emigration movement of the early 1850s.

On 11 June 1832 Humphrey O’Sullivan, a schoolteacher living in Callan, County Kilkenny, made the following entry in his diary:

O’Sullivan did not exaggerate. The events which he described were part of a remarkable popular panic which in the space of six days swept across the greater part of Ireland, from County Wexford in the south-east to County Donegal in the north-west, and from County Cork to the outskirts of Dublin city. It was an episode regarded by some contemporary observers with amused condescension, by others with deep alarm. For the modern historian it offers a brief but vivid insight into the mental world of a section of the catholic population in pre-Famine Ireland, and an opportunity to document in detail features of that mental world which are rarely reflected in conventional historical records.

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.

How small in fact were the differences between and within the Irish communities overseas, and between their cultures and work achievements and those of their host societies? The past decade has seen the arrival of fairly complete bibliographies of the Irish diaspora in the United States and in Britain, and substantial bibliographical essays on the Irish in Canada and in Australia. The pioneer volume of Hartigan and Hickman, compiled outside the academic grid and its resources, is welcome, intelligent and full of small surprises, despite some odd omissions (e.g. all but one of Denis Gwynn’s relevant titles). Yet, unlike Patrick Blessing, they could not rely on and collate existent bibliographies, as he could do with those of J. T. Ellis and Robert Trisco on American Catholic history (1982), Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes on Irish-American fiction (1979), and W. C. Miller (1975) and Séamus Metress (1981) on the bibliography of Irish-America overall.

It has long been recognised that the French revolution of 1848 had a profound effect on the rest of Europe. The overthrow of the Orleans monarchy and the establishment of the second republic were seen as heralding the dawn of a new age. Established governments, most of which had recognised that the Continent was approaching a period of crisis, anxiously expected the spread of the revolutionary contagion and the outbreak of a major European war, whilst the discontented elements found encouragement and inspiration from the events in Paris. In Great Britain the reaction to the events across the English Channel reflected this trend. This is the beginning', noted one member of the cabinet, recalling 1792; who will live to see the end?' The Chartists were jubilant, declaring that the time was now ripe to achieve their demands.

Of all the crown courts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, the chancery court has received the most favourable judgement from historians. Through its exercise of equity, the chancery court has been perceived as a mediator between English common law and Gaelic customary law. Equity provided the chancellor with the possibility of considering a judgement from the point of view of ‘reason and conscience’, to ensure what W. J. Jones has called the ‘protection of the innocent from the ruthless specifications’ of common law courts. In Irish terms this meant that the chancellor was prepared to consider Gaelic forms of partible inheritance from the standpoint of equity. In Gaelic society land descended according to a variety of customs which, it was argued in chancery, had been observed ‘time out of mind’ in a particular family or region and therefore in fairness or equity might be upheld even if they were contrary to common law practice.

This benign view of the Irish chancery court’s attitude to Gaelic customary law has much in common with the attitude of the English chancery court towards women. Historians of early modern England have portrayed chancery as a judicial forum which provided women with legal redress which would have been denied them at common law. Female litigants in the sixteenth-century English chancery court included single, widowed and married women. Under common law, only single women and widows were entitled to legal representation in their own right. Married women, as femmes couvertes, were legally merged with their husbands on marriage, and so could not bring cases in their own name at common law. In the English chancery court, however, a small number of married women were permitted at the discretion of the chancellor to sue on their own without their husbands. In the course of the sixteenth century the English chancery also contributed to the extension of the legal franchise of women.

During the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, ‘Black ’47’, tens of thousands of people fled across the Irish Sea from Ireland to Britain, desperately escaping the starvation and disease plaguing their country. These refugees, crowding unavoidably into the most insalubrious accommodation British towns and cities had to offer, were soon blamed for deadly outbreaks of epidemic typhus which emerged across the country during the first half of 1847. Indeed, they were accused of transporting the pestilence, then raging in Ireland, over with them. Typhus mortality rates in Ireland and Britain soared, and so closely connected with the disease were the Irish in Britain that it was widely referred to as ‘Irish fever’. Much of what we know about this epidemic is based on a handful of studies focusing almost exclusively on major cities along the British west-coast. Moreover, there has been little attempt to understand the legacy of the episode on the Irish in Britain. Taking a national perspective, this article argues that the ‘Irish fever’ epidemic of 1847 spread far beyond the western port of entry, and that the epidemic, by entrenching the association of the Irish with deadly disease, contributed significantly to the difficulties Britain's Irish population faced in the 1850s.

During the late nineteenth century Michael Davitt was a persistent advocate of a solid Irish-British working-class alliance to realise the political and social aspirations of the working people of both countries. Though he took it all rather more personally, the Irish Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor often made the same point. But the dynamic movement of Englishmen and Irishmen to challenge the establishment that governed both countries and to effect the restructuring of its economic and social bases did not develop during the century spanned by the lives of O’Connor and Davitt despite a brief period of mutually-perceived Anglo-Irish working-class common interest and some active collaboration. The functional life of this ’alliance’ between the English and Irish leaderships during the revolutionary year 1848 was of short duration. But in Lancashire, English Chartists and members of the Irish Confederation combined for several months of agitation before the fledgling fraternisation was smashed by arrests and flagging interest.

Warfare in Ireland in the sixteenth century must be considered in close relation to the political conditions prevailing in the country during the century. In the beginning of the century the Pale, or that part of Ireland in which the writ of the king of England ran, comprised only half of the four counties lying near Dublin. Outside the Pale were ninety states or lordships ruled by lords, often called by the English captains, who, having despotic jurisdiction within the state, made peace or war as they chose. These lordships have, very appropriately, been called the autonomous states by a modern Irish historian. About one-third of these autonomous states were ruled by lords of English origin who had in language, manners, and customs become almost as Irish as the Irish themselves. Every state, even the smallest, had its armed forces.

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.