‘Compared with present work in British and American economic history’, observes Dr L. A. Clarkson, ‘current Irish writing looks a trifle old-fashioned, with the bewitching voices of the social sciences muted and statistical wizardry missing’. While historically-minded sociologists might consider that this judgement of a meagre contribution from the social sciences needs qualification, there is no doubt that studies embodying sophisticated quantitative techniques are only beginning to trickle into the mainstream of Irish historiography. Yet there have been a number of important contributions, particularly in econometric history. While these constitute a small current in the flood of historical writings in the last decade or so, their qualitative and strategic significance is such as to merit detailed analysis.

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.

‘Home rule’, complained Augustine Birrell, ‘is the most unlucky cause mortal man was ever associated with. Its path is strewn with ghosts and skeletons — wine, women and money. Now it is money. … Sentiment is easily kept alive, from one generation to another; it costs nothing but a harp and a song. But cash — where is that to come from?’ The problem of finance proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to any compromise over Irish home rule at the abortive Irish Convention of 1917–18. By contrast, the struggle over the third home-rule bill from 1912 to 1914 was dominated by the question of Ulster and not finance. The bill was ultimately wrecked by the opposition of the Ulster protestants to any home-rule bill for a united Ireland. Home-rule finance has been overlooked by most historians because it seemed less important and no doubt also because it was immensely complicated. But the problem of finance was a very real difficulty which still confronted politicians even if the objections of the Ulster protestants could be overcome. More important, the complex relationship between Ireland and Britain cannot be fully understood unless the financial dimension is taken into account.

John V. Kelleher of Harvard remarked to me in October 1982: ‘I used to think I knew a little about the Irish in America. Now I realise I just knew a lot about the Irish in Lawrence.’ The pioneer and comprehensive bibliography by Seamus Metress of Toledo underscores what scholars of Irish America now perhaps generally recognise.

Virtually all general treatment of Irish America, as of so many other topics in American history, has been flawed by premature generalisation. The pressures to simplify a sub-topic such as Irish America have been understandable and considerable, given the multiform character of national development. Nonetheless, half a century or more after general historians have taken account of America’s pluralism, regionalism and political decentralisation, scholars attempting an overview of Irish America have inclined to the shortcut. Assuming that the body of Irish-Americans are today found in Boston, New York city and Philadelphia, they have tended to discuss the political, social and religious history of the community as though these cities and their past encapsulated it. A demurrer has come from Chicago; but its scholars have in turn tended to correct the picture with an eye to their own particular experience. As a result, most general treatments bear the hallmark of their origin: those of Daniel Moynihan, William Shannon, George Potter, Thomas N. Brown and Oscar Handlin being shaped by the assumptions of the Atlantic urban seabord; those of L. J. McCaffrey, Andrew Greeley and Ernest Levine by a Chicago counter-emphasis. More seriously, recent attempts to establish a more scientific methodology for the study of Irish and other immigrant groups, as pioneered by Stephan Thernstrom in 1964 and mushrooming since then, have been biased toward this east-coast selectivity of the more traditional historians. Thus, minute studies of occupational mobility, marriage and fertility patterns, working lives and community concentration and dispersal have assumed, and even asserted, the representativeness of east coast experience, especially that of New England; no fewer than eleven Massachusetts cities have enjoyed full-scale academic study of their Irish proletariats.