Twentieth-century scholars critically re-examining Ireland's origin myths explained how ‘synthetic pseudo-history’ such as the Lebor Gabála érenn arose. Sports, like nations, have need of origin myths, chess being no exception; moreover, sporting preferences have sometimes become bound up with a nation's sense of its unique identity. In the same ancient manuscripts where Celtic revivalists found legends of the earliest people in Ireland, they often also found references to board games. What may be called the myth of Celtic chess then emerged.

Ulster has not yet been invaded systematically, but from the information we have received, many important centres are taking to the fields in the most enthusiastic manner'. Thus wrote Gaelic Athletic Association (G.A.A.) founder Michael Cusack in 1885. It was fashionable then to refer to a national sports party ‘invading’ another land to exhibit a sport to the host country, but Cusack was probably parodying unionist depictions of recent nationalist political campaigns in the north-east as ’invasions’ – a term that itself mocked nationalism and its southern promoters as foreign entities in the north.

In 1903 the governor of South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, agreed to proposals from the owners of the Transvaal gold mines to alleviate the labour shortage caused by the recent war by recruiting workers from China. The Conservative government of Arthur Balfour gave its approval in May 1904, and had overall responsibility for the scheme until it yielded power to the Liberals in December 1905. The so-called ‘coolies’ were to be indentured on a three-year contract, paid less than the blacks, and quarantined from the local population. Well before the first shipment arrived on the Witwatersrand in June 1904, British trade unionists were alarmed that a precedent was being set for the importation of cheap labour closer to home, and Britain’s ‘Non-conformist conscience’ was disturbed at the spectre of ‘nameless practices’ developing in compounds of young men separated from their families. Events seemed to bear out the apprehensions.

Irish nationalist politics between 1906 and 1909 revolved around the twin demands of self-government and a resolution of the land issue; as such, the period was demarcated by two pieces of Liberal government legislation: the May 1907 Irish Council Bill and Birrell’s December 1909 land act. The latter was partially a response to western Irish Republican Brotherhood (I.R.B.)-inspired ‘agrarian militancy’ on the part of the United Irish League (U.I.L.) and the emerging Sinn Féin movement’s ability to ‘outfank’ the Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.) on the issue, which effectively forced Irish Party leader John Redmond ‘to adopt a radical agrarian policy in June 1907’. However, outside Connacht, the U.I.L. could not be regarded as ‘the Land League reborn’. In east Tyrone, the demand for self-government dominated the nationalist agenda, a situation reinforced by the fact that local politics had been ‘cast in the denominational mould which has characterised them ever since’. As a result, the Board of Erin section of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (A.O.H.) was the motor of popular nationalist mobilisation, leaving the U.I.L.

At the beginning of 2001 the First Minister of Northern Ireland, David Trimble, found himself confronted with more than his fair share of intractable diffculties: having narrowly survived an internal vote of the Ulster Unionist Party on whether to continue in government, Trimble surveyed an unpromising political landscape dominated by the rise of the rival Democratic Unionist Party and the I.R.A.’s continued refusal to decommission all its weapons. Despite all this, in late January 2001 Trimble devoted considerable time to attacking the B.B.C. for having made the Rebel Heart drama series. Claiming to be loosely based on real events, the programmes implied that the Belfast police had killed six members of the McMahon household on 24 March 1922.

Everybody’s doing it. The Americans, the British and the Australians have gone online. The Spanish are planning a blockbuster; the Dutch would like to begin afresh; and the Germans are developing a European portal through which all of these different national projects – and many more – can be accessed. Meanwhile, the Irish have just published their own, in nine volumes of print as well as online. Why should national biographical dictionaries suddenly be in vogue?