Fosterage was widely practised in Ireland in the Middle Ages. It even survived in some form in certain parts of the country into the nineteenth century. The institution was highly regulated in the medieval period. It is the purpose of this article to consider the nature of fosterage and the role of the foster mother. Central to a better understanding of childcare arrangements at the time, and to the bonds which developed from them, are the questions of the age at which fosterage began and of whether or not wet-nursing commonly occurred. It will be argued that custody of infants from a very early age was much more common than has often been supposed and that wet nurses were frequently necessary, and well respected, participants in the upbringing of foster children.

This article rethinks the early Reformation in Ireland by approaching Henrician politics and sovereignty as problems of Christian moral order. Focusing on treason and dissimulation as age-old signs of moral perfidy that became emblematic of a stubborn attachment to Rome, it shows how after the Kildare Rebellion, both re-oriented English-Irish factional rivalries within a Reformation key by demarcating the ‘true subject’ from dissident persons and conducts. Both, in short, were now volatile loci of embattled Tudor and papal sovereignties. Key here were Lord Deputy Leonard Grey and the bogeymen of post-Reformation Henrician order: the Geraldines and friars he was accused of supporting. The article shows how Grey’s position as the late earl of Kildare’s brother-in-law and surrogate allowed a discourse of treason and dissimulation to crystallise in the factional opposition to his rule and into a distinctly early Reformation polemic. Out of struggles between royalists and ‘papists’ there emerged the newly polarised terms of Henrician order: cast as the enemy of the king’s ‘true subjects’, Grey died a traitor’s death in 1541 as the purported leader of the ‘Geraldine and papistical traitorous sect’. The early Reformation thus witnessed a distinctly Henrician and preconfessional polarisation of political life in Ireland.

This article examines the creation in the early 1710s of a library at the Dublin military hospital for old soldiers known as the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (RHK). It shows that the library was created after an appeal by the master of the RHK, describes the books in the collection, and examines the gifts from a significant pool of seventy-one high-status men and women across Ireland from which the collection was constructed. It considers why the library was created at this time and its use during the two centuries that would elapse before the final closure of the hospital in the wake of Irish independence. This article is the first ever examination of the physical books and makes significant use of the minute books of the board of the RHK and its sub-committees, manuscript records that historians have tended to assume were lost or destroyed after the evacuation of British troops from the twenty-six counties.

Over Bastille Day weekend in July of 1792, nine Irish harpers gathered at the Belfast Assembly Rooms. Their performances of traditional Irish music were heard by a mostly appreciative audience and transcribed by Edward Bunting (1773–1843), a young Anglican church musician from Armagh, whose long and distinguished career of collecting Irish music began that weekend. This article corrects the common misconception that this event, which has come to be known as the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival, was organised by the United Irishmen. It suggests instead that manifestations of Welsh and Scottish cultural and musical nationalism — specifically the eisteddfod and Scots musical museum — were the true antecedents to the Belfast Harp Festival.

Skibbereen has become a byword for famine, frequently appearing in academic literature on humanitarian disasters — but almost always as a symbol of Irish victimhood. By contrast, this article seeks to demonstrate that the town of Skibbereen was a centre of agency and innovation with far-reaching impact throughout Ireland and beyond. It examines the hands-on efforts of local people to take charge of a dire situation, highlighting three key aspects inadequately considered by previous research. First, a Skibbereen deputation to London played a crucial role in establishing the British Relief Association, the major voluntary aid effort at the time. Secondly, a soup house founded in Skibbereen became the model for the most effective governmental relief effort in Ireland. Thirdly, Skibbereen was the home of an elaborate emigration scheme to rescue starving individuals that was launched early and sustained for a long time. This article reveals a significant disparity between the widely accepted image of Skibbereen as a place of passive suffering and the lesser-known agency and innovation of its people. Ultimately, this case study not only sheds light on the recipient perspectives and complexities of humanitarian aid, but also serves as a testament to the resilience and resourcefulness of local Irish leaders.

In March 1874, Christopher Rafferty was buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Chicago. He had been executed for the shooting of police officer Patrick O’Meara two years previously. It took three trials for Rafferty’s death sentence to be carried out and, in that time, his class, criminality and masculinity were discussed in newspaper columns across the United States. While alluded to in life, it was only in death that his Irishness became the focus of reporting. This article uses Christopher Rafferty’s murder of fellow Irishman Patrick O’Meara to explore newspaper representations of ethnicity, class and criminality in 1870s Chicago. It argues that community mourning rituals deemed to be particularly ‘Irish’ were central to Rafferty being transformed from a petty criminal from the South Side of Chicago to an Irish-American in the press. Focusing on Christopher Rafferty and Patrick O’Meara, this article contributes to discussions on the shifting ways that identity is understood and presented in different contexts. It examines newspaper coverage to consider the ways that ethnic stereotypes were used and discarded depending on the law-and-order priorities of the day.

Soon after the Irish Civil War (1922–3), the Irish Free State government introduced the first Army Pensions Act (1923). This act compensated the dependants of deceased republican combatants of the 1916 Easter Rising and War of Independence (1919–21) and those of National Army soldiers during the civil war. In Northern Ireland, the government’s hostility towards republicanism complicated the development and adjudication of military service pension claims and imbued the process with considerable personal risk. This article, drawing on 237 dependant pension files from Northern Ireland, centres on the practical and subjective experience of the pension claim process that was, for many, characterised by complications and the threat of state interference that weighed heavily on claimants. It further examines the ad hoc character of the dependant claim assessment process in the north and what dependant letters — underpinned by economic and political grievances — reveal about their attitudes to life in Northern Ireland.