Irish environmental history is a curiosity. It is, formally speaking, a component of Irish historiography still in its infancy. Yet, a case can be made that a huge segment of nineteenth-century Irish historiography is— unwittingly—environmental history. Much of this historiography concerns agrarian distress, landlord–tenant relations, and successive campaigns for land reform; in other words, the political, social, and economic use of the natural environment. For all this focus on land—and it was, of course, the political and social question of the day for much of the nineteenth century in Ireland—the general reluctance of historians to conceptualize the Irish experience in terms of the history of the environment is striking. The land question dominated political debate in Ireland (and, indeed, in Britain), and it is this aspect which has shaped the historiography for decades. Yet, while contemporary arguments for and against land reform were often couched in the language of political economy and legal rights, it was, for advocates of change, also a question of environmental justice.

Recent theories of environmental justice tend to stress the importance of indigenous rights and local control over lands and natural resources in the face of external state or capital interest. In many respects advocates of land reform in nineteenth-century Ireland also used languages that chime with notions of ‘indigenous’ rights and the struggle for local control over natural resources, opening up a Pandora's box of national and sectarian conflict. To demand ‘the land of Ireland for the people of Ireland’, as was common during the Land War (1879–82), implied that it was clear who constituted the people of Ireland and, as such, who was entitled to make use of Ireland’s natural resources. That this was far from clear in practice, as many historians have shown, did not diminish the political traction notions of indigeneity came to have. Indeed, the turn to Home Rule from 1870, and especially after 1879, manifested an upsurge in nationalist sentiment in combination with frustration that long-standing environmental grievances had not been addressed. Nationalists imagined that a Dublin parliament might legislate for agrarian fairness where Westminster had failed to.