This paper will attempt to shed some additional light on the background and motives of those who were to play a leading part in the scheme for the Irish adventurers. The focus will be upon those Englishmen, and Londoners in particular, who invested from 1642 onwards in the reconquest of Ireland in return for grants of Irish land once the island had been secured again. It will be argued that militants who regarded themselves as belonging to the chosen ranks of the godly — that is the minority of mankind singled out for salvation by God, and thus constituting his elect or saints — played a leading part in the scheme and were among its most committed participants, and that they later helped to shape English policy towards Ireland. These militants were also ardent advocates of reformation in church and state in England in the 1640s, and they viewed Ireland and the successful Catholic rising in 1641 from a perspective highly coloured by antipopery. They tended to see the struggle taking place in the mid-seventeenth century in Britain, Ireland and Europe generally in black-and-white terms, as a struggle between true religion (by which was meant a thoroughly reformed Protestant church) and the Antichrist as represented by the pope and the forces believed to be ranged under him in the Catholic church.

Although it has long been recognised that the politics of the larger Irish borough constituencies before the reform acts of 1832 turned on conflicts of opinion over serious issues, thorough analysis has been hampered by the paucity of one crucial type of evidence — the poll book. This necessary resource for candidates in the days of open voting, in which in their most complete form the names, addresses, qualifications, occupations and votes of the voters at a particular election are recorded, has survived in substantial numbers for English constituencies but rarely for those in Ireland. Cork City is an exception. Poll books for the seven contested elections in this constituency between 1812 and 1830 have survived, and these, together with the more commonplace statistical and written evidence which they enrich, provide ample material for a thorough analysis — in this case of voting behaviour. In this paper we provide a description of the general social and economic contexts of elections in Cork and focus upon the results of a variety of psephological tests to which the poll books have been subjected.

Little has been written of the optimism and excitement among Irish immigrants and other Americans during the revolutionary months of 1848, the European ‘springtime of the peoples’. Studies of Irish-American nationalism hasten over the mobilisation of funds and arms to register the impact of failure. The ignominious collapse of the Young Ireland rising in Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch was to compel Irish-Americans to reconstruct their identity, to redefine the ways and means of their nationalist project. Irish-American nationalism became self-enclosed and self-reliant, an attitude evinced in a pattern of ethnic associational culture extending from mutual improvement to terrorist planning. During the heady months of 1848, however, a different mood prevailed. Looking across the Atlantic to revolutionary Europe, Irish immigrants invoked an international republicanism in which America, their adopted homeland, held pride of place. By recalling their hosts to their revolutionary past, Irish-Americans challenged narrow isolationism — and ‘Know-Nothing’ prejudice — to gain substantial, if temporary, native support.

Protestant working-class loyalists have been found not only in Belfast, behind the painted kerbs and muralled gables of the Shankill Road and Ballysillan. Recent research has found working-class loyalism in the Ulster hinterland of mid-Armagh. However, most of what has been written on southern Protestantism, beyond Belfast and Ulster, has been on the gentry class. Yet Dublin was once the centre of organised Protestant opinion in Ireland and had, in the early nineteenth century, an assertive and exuberantly sectarian Protestant working class. This paper is based on a study of the Protestant working class of Dublin, and examines its organisation and activism as revealed in the City and County of Dublin Conservative Workingmen’s Club (henceforth C.W.C.). The club owned a substantial Georgian house on York Street, off St Stephen’s Green where the modern extension to the Royal College of Surgeons now stands. The club was sustained by a core of activists numbering around three hundred, the usual print-run for the ballot papers at the annual general meeting. The Protestant working class numbered 5,688 in the city in 1881. The county area numbered 4,096, making a total of 9,784 Protestant workingclass men. The city and county total of about 10,000 remained stable up to the census of 1911. Combined with the Protestant lower middle class of clerks and shopkeepers, the potential to be mobilised by the C.W.C. numbered over 20,000. The club records are used to relate the experience of the Dublin Protestant working class firstly to the more familiar working-class loyalism of Ulster, and secondly to working-class Toryism and the concept of the labour aristocracy.

Corporatism or vocationalism had many advocates throughout Europe in the 1930s. Corporatists rejected the extremes of laissez-faire capitalism, with its attendant exploitation of workers, and totalitarian communism, with its emphasis on the doctrine of class struggle. They recommended a middle way between two hostile systems and sought to achieve social harmony by means of the establishment of corporations, representative of workers and employers, to regulate the various areas of national economic activity. These corporations were to secure co-operation between capital and labour, thus eliminating social conflict. In Ireland vocationalism had been popularised by the papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, and it had strong proponents among certain elements in Fine Gael and the Blueshirts while both were under the leadership of General Eoin O’Duffy in 1933 and 1934. The spectacular failure of the Blueshirts and O’Duffy’s incompetence as Fine Gael leader resulted in the corporate-inspired Labour policy of Fine Gael, published in 1934, being ignored by historians. Yet it is worthy of attention, not least because it was the only significant policy formulation by vocationalists within Fine Gael. Furthermore, an examination of the proposals serves to illuminate reasons why corporatism and the Blueshirts were doomed to political failure.

On 11 July 1332 William de Bermingham, brother of the earl of Louth, was hanged at Dublin by order of the justiciar, Anthony de Lucy. This event is recorded by Clyn, by the author of the Annals of Ross and by the Dublin annalist, all of whom praise Bermingham for his military excellence but do not give any explanation for the execution. All the chroniclers mention Bermingham’s arrest earlier in the year, but the connexion between the two events is never stated.

In February and March 1332 William had been indicted by juries at Clonmel and Limerick of involvement in two alleged conspiracies, one in 1326 and the other in 1331, both of which had as their supposed object the establishment of the earl of Desmond as king of Ireland. The surviving indictments do not mention William’s son Walter, but he is later described as also having been indicted of felony. Both William and Walter were arrested by the justiciar at Clonmel in February 1332, held locally until Lucy had concluded his business in Munster, and then transferred on 19 April to Dublin castle, where two of the other named conspirators, Desmond himself and Henry de Mandeville, had been imprisoned since the previous year. Yet another conspirator, Walter de Burgh, was in the custody of his cousin, the earl of Ulster, in Northburgh castle.

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.