James Eadie Todd was appointed to the chair of modern history in Queen’s University, Belfast in 1919, aged thirty-four, having previously held academic posts in Edinburgh, Montreal and Halifax, Nova Scotia. Todd published almost nothing but spent his career as a teacher, and his carefully prepared formal lectures guided generations of Queen’s students to a pass degree. But he also had the ability to inspire a minority of students to the further study of history and several of his pupils went on to occupy chairs of history in Ireland and Great Britain. During the 1930s, with his former pupil T. W. Moody, he created an honours and graduate school with a strong emphasis on Irish history. Todd stressed the importance of the objective study of the sources. Behind the scenes he was instrumental, with others, in founding the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies and establishing Irish Historical Studies. His later years were plagued by ill health and personal bereavement. He retired in 1945 and died four years later. The article concludes with an assessment of Todd’s importance to the professionalisation of Irish historical scholarship.

The creation of a network of county infirmaries was a remarkable achievement in late eighteenth-century Ireland. Supported by grants from parliament and the county grand juries, each hospital was managed by governors whose subscriptions entitled them to appoint the medical staff and decide on the patient population. While the laudable aim of the legislators was that the infirmaries would be ‘a means of restoring the health and preserving the lives of many’, the reality was quite different. In 1788 the prison reformer, John Howard, and the inspector general of prisons, Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, delivered a damning report to parliament on the state of the county infirmaries. They described good care and governance in a minority of institutions, but most were in a very bad state; they noted decayed and broken buildings, dirty or no bedding, poor food, lack of regulation, financial malfeasance, few patients and absent staff. Based on their report, this paper argues that the county infirmaries benefited the governors and the staff considerably, and had little impact on the health of the nation. However, providing a hospital and trained medical professionals in every county was a significant step in the formation of the Irish institutional healthcare system.

The point of origin of the ‘Irish historiographical revolution’ initiated by T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards in the 1930s, which issued, among other things, in the foundation of Irish Historical Studies, is customarily located in their experiences together as research students in London University’s Institute of Historical Research. Hitherto, we have known little or nothing of those experiences beyond the recollections of the two principals themselves. This article uses the Institute’s own archive, and other contemporary documentary evidence, including surviving letters from Moody to Edwards, to elucidate the precise influence of the Institute and its staff in moulding their outlook. Rather than asserting some form of ideological indoctrination – for example in propagating an ethos of ‘value-free’ history writing – it argues that what was important was the example of the Institute’s institutional structures (including its Bulletin), which Moody and Edwards determined to replicate in Ireland; and that these structures, emphasising collaboration between historical researchers in pursuit of a common purpose, were themselves of the first importance in influencing the aspiration to create an Irish history free from confessional bias and overt expressions of political prejudice.

This paper explores the persistence of ecclesiastical influence on higher education in Ireland during an era of far-reaching policy change in the 1960s. The extensive interaction between political and official elites and the Catholic bishops offers a fascinating insight into the complex and contested process of policy formulation during an era of transformation in higher education. This study offers a re-interpretation of Whyte’s thesis that the Irish bishops displayed a ‘new flexibility’ in their response to governmental policy initiatives during this period, especially the initiative for university merger launched by Donogh O’Malley in 1967. Catholic prelates, notably John Charles McQuaid, the influential archbishop of Dublin, were pursuing a traditional Catholic religious and socio-political agenda in higher education, which sought not so much to accommodate new official initiatives as to shape such reforms in the ideological direction favoured by the bishops. McQuaid in particular enjoyed exceptional access to policy-makers and was an indispensable partner in launching the initiative for the university merger. The eventual failure of the merger, which was influenced by the successful resistance of academic elites and the declining significance of religious divisions in higher education, underlined the limits of ecclesiastical power in a rapidly changing society.