In 1584, Richard Stanihurst, who was by then living in the Spanish Netherlands in self-imposed exile, wrote that the people of that country were ‘exceedingly amazed when they converse with a native of Ireland who professes to knowing no Irish’. That observation seemed to epitomise the position of natives of the English colony in Ireland in the sixteenth century, who found themselves facing the universal problems of colonists. Their racial origins were misunderstood by foreigners, and they were treated patronisingly in their mother-country. Some years earlier, he had referred to how the dialect of travelling Palesmen was mocked by native Englishmen who ‘judge them, upon their first repair there, to learn their English in three or four days, as though they had bought at Chester a groat's worth of English, and so packed up the rest to be carried after them to London’.

In the second year of the English civil war both king and parliament sought and received substantial military assistance from outside the kingdom: Charles concluded a truce with the Irish rebels and began the importation of troops from Ireland; parliament negotiated the introduction of an army from Scotland. Historians of the period are agreed that these parallel steps had quite opposite results. While the Scots army is invariably viewed as a ‘big factor in turning the scales against the king’, Charles's importation of Irish soldiers is regarded as having an insignificant impact on his military situation and a disastrous effect upon his popular standing. Parliament's alliance with the Scots has therefore been acclaimed necessary and prudent, Charles's acquisition of Irish help a terrible blunder. Samuel R. Gardiner, in his classic history of the English civil war, singled out the king's importation of Irish troops to England as the act which did most to weaken his authority.

Between the summer of 1770 and the close of the year 1772, large areas of rural Ulster were rendered ungovernable by the activities of the Hearts of Steel or Steelboys. Agrarian agitation was not new, of course — during 1763 Tyrone, Armagh and Mormghan had been similarly affected by the Oakboys — but apart from the more serious and more prolonged nature of the Hearts of Steel outbreak, which gave it a notoriety and importance of its own, and the curious fact that the agitators were presbyterians, it had this unique feature: its outbreak and the heavy emigration which followed its spread and suppression were almost universally ascribed to the wicked greed of a single great landowner, the fifth earl (later first marquis) of Donegall.

The celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the two societies, the Irish Historical Society and the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, suggests that, having looked backwards over the achievements of the first forty years, we may look forward to what might be done in the comparable future.

The main achievements of these societies, the promoting of objective Irish history and the maintaining of a common cultural outlook on Irish history, were secured by the admission of Ireland as a cultural entity to the international historical organisation, the Comité International des Sciences Historiques.

The great tradition of the Buachailli Bána in the south of Ireland had its small beginnings on the Tipperary side of the Knockmealdown mountains during the closing months of 1761. ‘ Their first rise was in October last,’ a Youghal gentleman told his son in London in April 1762, ‘ and they have ever since been increasing;… they always assembled in the night with their shirts over their clothes, which caused them to be called Whiteboys. ’ The exactions of tithe-farmers and the enclosure of commonage sparked the initial oath-bound combination in the district between Clogheen and Ballyporeen. A recently installed tithe-farmer named Dobbyn, who kept an inn at Ballyporeen, issued the novel demand that local catholic couples pay him a fee of 5s. when they married before a priest. Among those who vehemently denounced this new tax was Fr Nicholas Sheehy, the outspoken, socially committed young parish priest of Shanrahan; Fr Sheehy had already attracted the disapproving notice of local protestant ministers and magistrates by opposing the collection of church rates when he was stationed in the parish of Newcastle, and by proclaiming the excommunication of the inhabitants of the town of Mitchelstown and the parish of Brigown Fant, who was later convicted of riot and trespass and sentenced to a fine of £50 and two years in prison, seemed a rather pathetic and improbable leader of an agrarian movement. But the action of the crowd he had harangued at Kilmallock proved contagious. From there the disturbances spread northwards to the districts of Bruff, Hospital, and Caherconlish. Bodies of Levellers, collected by the blowing of horns, mobilised ‘ in great numbers ’ and fired guns as they marched along in their white shirts, ‘ demolishing in the night time the fences of the inclosures ’ of many persons and ‘ swearing fidelity to each other and secrecy ’.

There must still be room for argument over whether Ireland's ‘war of independence’ was a spontaneous movement of the mass of the people, as Republicans hold, or whether, as the British government liked to suggest, it was essentially the work of a handful of fanatical terrorists. In attempting to resolve this argument, considerable weight must be placed on instances of what would now be called civil resistance—where the government is opposed by ordinary members of the public. Foremost amongst these are politically-motivated industrial actions. It is a curious feature of Irish historiography that very little attention has in fact been paid to the industrial actions which occurred during the Anglo-Irish conflict of 1916-1921, most notably the embargo on the transportation of government forces and munitions implemented by Irish railway workers between May and December 1920.

‘We are now’, wrote James Anthony Froude, as he approached the topic of the outbreak of the civil war in Ulster in October 1641, ‘ upon the edge of the gravest event in Irish history, the turning-point on which all later controversies between England and Ireland hinge ’. Froude may have exaggerated, but few would quarrel with Lecky's comment on the same issue that ‘ hardly any page of history has been more misrepresented ’. It is well known that the reason for the controversy surrounding the events in Ulster in 1641 is that they have been linked with a charge against the Irish of perpetrating a ‘ general massacre ’ of British protestants at the outbreak of the war in which tens, even hundreds, of thousands of protestants were killed. The allegation of a ‘ general massacre ’ has, in turn, been used as a moral justification for subsequent English policy in Ireland.

Controversy has always surrounded the Irish policy of Lord Randolph Churchill. In particular, he played an important part in opposing Gladstone’s home rule bill of 1886, when he ‘played the Orange card’. But despite this episode there has been much varied speculation about his real attitude towards home rule. Was he a sincere and consistent opponent of home rule, as his son and his friend, Rosebery, claimed, or was he, as Wilfred Blunt alleged, a secret sympathiser with home rule? Alternatively, did Churchill merely adopt an opportunist attitude towards home rule as Robert Rhodes James has implied? In their recent book, entitled The Governing Passion, A. B. Cooke and J. R. Vincent have produced a new and idiosyncratic interpretation of Churchill’s involvement with Ireland and home rule in the period 1885-6. The purpose of this enquiry is to re-examine these interpretations, especially Cooke and Vincent’s.

The general election of 1922 was the first election to be held in the independent Irish state, the first held under the PR electoral system, and the first to be contested by the parties which, in modified forms, were to dominate subsequent Irish politics. The 1918 election, at which Sinn Féin had routed the Irish parliamentary party, had been the last of the old order. The 1922 election was the first of the new order — the two wings of Sinn Féin were challenged by Labour and other interests, as was to be the pattern for the next fifty years at least. In that light, this paper represents an attempt to start the scarcely-begun task of closely analysing modern Irish elections. Furthermore, the 1922 election merits attention because of the unusual circumstances under which it was held, foremost among which was the ‘pact’ between Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera.

The primary aim of this paper is to assess the role of the Roman Catholic clergy in agricultural co-operative development, drawing on evidence from the last decade of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century. It is hardly possible, however, to treat such activity in isolation from the manifold preoccupations of rural society, as in practice no clear demarcation existed between economic and non-economic activity. An attempt is made to place such clerical activity in the cultural context of rural society, while simultaneously paying attention to the specific ideological, pastoral and economic pre-occupations of the clergy, and while treating the latter as a distinctive social category with affiliations both within and beyond the rural community.

The results of the religious inquiry in the Irish census of 1861 (which showed that the established church commanded the allegiance of only one-eighth of the population) were used extensively in the debate on church disestablishment, and the results of successive religious inquiries have been since used for a variety of purposes. This paper considers the origins of the inquiry, the controversy surrounding its first inclusion in the census, and the importance of church disestablishment in that controversy.

The thesis defended in this contribution to Viking studies in the British Isles is simple and straightforward. It is argued that the Viking warrior Ragnarr Loðbrók was an historical personage. Tradition associates him with the area about the Kattegat and in particular with south Norway and Zealand where Ragnarr and his sons were the leaders of a large force of vikings. These were sea-kings rather than rulers of territories. Ragnarr flourished in the first half of the ninth century and died some time after 851. Amongst his many sons, three were famous: Ívarr inn beinlausi, Hálfdan and Ubbe. Ragnarr was the leader (or one of the leaders) of the Danish attack on the Irish Vikings, probably Norwegians, in 851 and his son Ívarr established himself as king of Dublin which he ruled jointly from 853 with one Óláfr, identical with the Vestfold king, Óláfr Geirstaðaálfr, who after years of campaigning in Ireland with Ívarr returned to Norway in or about 871.

History has an attraction for the amateur as well as for the professional, and though the attraction may be of a similar kind, the amateur is rarely given access to primary sources. Yet it is from these that history is written and fundamentally experienced. Giraldus Gambrensis (1146-1223) wrote about Ireland and his native Wales in the late twelfth century in such a fashion that his works can be read with pleasure, profit and, if correctly presented, understanding by both amateur and professional. Most of his works have been available to professional historians for a century in the edition published in the Rolls Series; the rest of his works have been edited since then. Yet surprisingly, rather little use was made of them until very recently. Only over the past decade has the work of this colourful and controversial individual attracted more than passing attention.