This study was conceived in the tranquil atmosphere of Peterhouse, continued in more turbulent times in Cork, and completed on the serene slopes of Fiesole. I gladly acknowledge my debt to Peterhouse, where I learned much not only about scholarship, but about fellowship. I do not seek, however, to emulate what has ‘become the Peterhouse manner – stern, unrefutable and arcane’. If there be stern and arcane passages in this book, their inspiration derives from other sources. And I hope the text remains sufficiently intelligible throughout to be consistently refutable!

The late F. S. L. Lyons lamented nearly twenty years ago that the historian of contemporary Ireland is condemned to make bricks without straw. The supply of straw has greatly increased since then. There has been a massive expansion in the available archival material, and a marked increase in relevant published work, not only by historians but by scholars in cognate disciplines. Yet the present situation contains its own dangers. The avalanche of archival material, only a small fraction of which has been excavated, not only threatens to obscure perspective beneath mounds of detail, but also to lull the historian, starved for so long of any archival sustenance, into complacency concerning the enduring quality of his necessarily provisional conclusions.

One function of the historian is to transcend the fragmentation of perspective characteristic of the contemporary mind. Research is now so specialised that this fundamental objective has become increasingly difficult to attain.