In a collected volume assessing Ireland’s involvement in European integration Gearóid Mac Niocaill and Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh wrote that

However, Patrick Keatinge reminded readers of the same volume that ‘Up to the late 1950s Ireland’s diplomatic persona was only slightly “European”.’ Most Irish diplomatic historians would agree with this interpretation, arguing that Britain, the Commonwealth and the League of Nations remained the primary focus of Irish foreign policy in the inter-war period. Supporting Keatinge’s interpretation, the existing historical literature suggests that Irish diplomats were rather slow in renewing the perceived longstanding contacts with continental Europe before the Second World War. Indeed, Roy Foster has criticised the discursive claim of Ireland’s longstanding contacts with continental Europe, made by many Irish policy-makers at the time of Ireland’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973, as a ‘grandiose self-delusion’. Most historical accounts, therefore, suggest that Ireland’s involvement in Europe tentatively started with the involvement in the Marshall Plan and participation in the Council of Europe.

The poet and novelist Francis Stuart’s sojourn in Germany during the Second World War and his broadcasting activities for the Nazis remain a cnámh spairne among historians and journalists alike. Assessments of his radio talks range from that of his biographer J.H. Natterstad, who described them as being of ‘a literary or semi-literary’ character, to that of Kevin Myers, who equated the broadcasts with ‘voluntary siding with the most bestial régime in the history of civilisation’. In October 1997 a television documentary during which Stuart was quoted as saying that ‘the Jew was always the worm that got into the rose and sickened it’ triggered off a long-running controversy in the letters pages of the Irish Times. Some prominent intellectuals rushed to Stuart’s defence, arguing, for example, that the worm metaphor was indeed a positive one, representing the ‘hidden, unheroic and critical’. On the other hand, leaving aside the question whether or not Stuart was an antisemite, two German emigrants to Ireland argued that anyone, including Stuart, ‘who lived in Germany at that time, any person working for the Ministry of Propaganda had to be an active Nazi sympathiser’. From a more scholarly perspective, David O’Donoghue has recorded that in his radio talks Stuart was neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Russian, while Dermot Keogh suggested that Stuart’s broadcasts from Germany in fact mirrored the content of antisemitic publications in Ireland at the time. Stuart himself denied ever having backed the Nazis, and rejected the charge of antisemitism in the R.T.É. interview broadcast in January 1998: ‘I never supported that régime.’

The 1930s in Northern Ireland was a period of rituals, performed for the population at large. Such unionist demonstrations and theatrical set pieces were unique manifestations of unionist culture. In a period of austerity and high unemployment in Northern Ireland, and increasingly aggressive nationalism in the Irish Free State, they were also a response to political developments. The demonstrations of the 1930s provided unionists with a common political tradition with which to identify, as well as an affirmation of the state, particularly through unionist involvement in royal occasions. The colour and drama of these ceremonies was forcefully conveyed through the pages of the main unionist papers, the Belfast Newsletter, the Northern Whig and the Belfast Telegraph, as the theatricality of the third home rule drama had been. The attention given to these rituals in the press in Northern Ireland is important because it was through the press that these often elitist events were made accessible to the population at large. Through press coverage, which was as comprehensive as it was dramatic, the masses were at least given a sense that they were participating in the collective life of their community. The major ceremonial festivals of this decade were those which celebrated Edward Carson: the opening of the Stormont parliament, which was presented as the first monument to the former unionist leader; the unveiling of the statue honouring him in 1933; his funeral in 1935; and the unveiling of a plaque in his honour in 1938. Andrew Gailey has already outlined the way in which Carson’s ‘performances’ were orchestrated in the period of the third home rule crisis. Carson’s appearances were, he argues, limited to ‘maintain an air of mystery’, while unionist meetings were made a ‘social occasion to remember, with large crowds, local bands and choirs and with the entertainment of theatrical parades, inspections, mounted escorts of lancers’. In the 1930s similar theatrical techniques were employed; unionist commemorations in this period were marked by distinctive ceremonial settings, formal speeches and, often, impressive dress. Loudspeakers were installed at the opening of parliament, and also at the unveiling of the Carson statue and during his funeral, in order to enable the audience to feel more intimately involved in the proceedings.

The political career of Sir Francis Annesley, Lord Mountnorris, is well known to historians. A first-generation settler, he held plantation lands in Ulster and Munster; as vice-treasurer of Ireland he became a rival of the Boyle faction in the Dublin administration in the early 1630s; and after a spectacular fall from grace in 1635 he became one of Lord Deputy Wentworth’s bitterest enemies and spoke against him at his trial in 1641. Yet, unlike his rival, the first earl of Cork, there is little information about Mountnorris’s personal attitudes, his religious views or his family life, other than what can be gleaned from official sources, and from the (mainly hostile) comments of contemporaries. The discovery, therefore, of a cache of family papers in the Public Record Office at Kew provides a unique opportunity to flesh out the bones of his political career. It also allows a comparison between the Annesleys and the Boyles, whose extensive archive has moulded our view of the New English in general. Perhaps the most interesting of these documents is Mountnorris’s letter to his daughter, Beatrice Zouche, dated 5 February 1641[/2], in which he outlines how he expects her to order her day with prayer and meditation and domestic concerns appropriate for a godly matron. This letter reveals a great deal about Mountnorris’s own religious beliefs and his attitudes to his children, and provides some important clues about the mindset of the New English in Ireland.

The union of the neighbouring episcopal sees of Lismore and Waterford on 16 June 1363 brought to an end a history of disputes and sometimes violent disagreements between the two bishoprics which had lasted for almost two centuries since the arrival of the English invaders in Ireland. The early history of this conflict, up to 1228, has already been dealt with in detail, while its conclusion, from 1325 onwards, has also been treated in outline. What happened between 1228 and 1325, however, has never been discussed, and while this note does not in any way purport to fill this gap, the document upon which it focuses, which dates from 1285, adds something to the stock of knowledge on this topic. It has been in print in summarised translation for well over a century, but it has never been published in full, analysed or put in context, and it has been quite ignored in all previous discussions of this controversy. It gives rise to some interesting questions about the relationship between the English and Irish administrations at the end of the thirteenth century, however, and about how important decisions were taken at the heart of Edward I’s government. It also casts intriguing light on a difficult time in the career of Stephen of Fulbourn, bishop of Waterford, perhaps Edward Fs most important and powerful servant in Ireland until his death in July 1288.

Historians feel the need to label their research. These labels can be either descriptive, for example by dynasties, such as ‘Tudor and Stuart history’, or interpretative (analytical), such as ‘the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation’. Alternatively, labels can be used as heuristic devices: ‘confessionalisation’ in preference to ‘Reformation and Counter-Reformation’. The theoretical approach expressed in the ‘confessionalisation paradigm’ claims to open up a perspective on all the essential forces at work in the era, whereas the empirical research, assumed to be covered by the more conventional labels, is deemed too compartmentalised.

Almost a century after the publication, in 1911, of the first two volumes of his magnum opus (the third and fourth appeared together in 1920) Goddard Henry Orpen’s Ireland under the Normans remains controversial. The way to test this is not to read the polite comments of this generation of his successors but to go to a university library, take all four volumes off the shelf, and expose one’s eyes to the palimpsest of student marginalia added down through the decades. Pencilled emotions ranging from anger and outrage to ridicule and blasphemy litter the pages and tarnish its author’s memory, every bit as much in the reprint (dating, interestingly, from 1968) as in the original edition.

When the first two volumes, covering the period 1169-1216, were published, they were warmly greeted in certain quarters, British journals in particular carrying laudatory reviews. But in nationalist Ireland grave offence was taken not merely at some of the author’s apparently callous and hurtful statements, but at his basic thesis, a thesis which Orpen set out clearly in the preface to his first volume:

There has been a remarkable revival of interest in the Irish abroad within the past ten years. In part this is attributable to the new confidence experienced by the Irish at home with the economic success of the ‘tiger economy’ and the decline of ‘migration by necessity’. Equally the Irish abroad, especially in the United States, have risen to the top of the immigrant pile and have achieved prosperity and assurance of their position in their adopted homelands. This itself has led to a reduction in some of the inhibitions that have held back serious attention to the history of the immigrants and to a recognition of their place in the sun. Public awareness has been further stimulated by changing patterns of immigration and by the development of new attitudes towards immigrants in the host societies, now including Ireland itself. Such changes have created a need to give meaning to the term ‘plural society’ and to challenge the racism that has characteristically followed in the wake of increased numbers of immigrants.

These seven books are representative of a large number that have begun to address the topic in the last few years from an historical point of view. For the most part they relate to the Irish in Britain but use the focus on the immigrants to open up issues about the history of Ireland and Britain and the role of each in an emerging global system. For example, one of them is a comparative account of the Irish in Liverpool and Philadelphia which allows consideration of some of the broader questions regarding the treatment of the Irish immigrant in the literature both by historians and other interested scholars.