One indication of Ireland's divided political culture is that there is no general agreement between most catholics and most protestants on a single set of national symbols. To take the case of a national festival, in the Republic of Ireland, where ninety-four per cent of the population is catholic, St Patrick's day (17 March) is celebrated at the popular level, the state level, and is a bank holiday. In Northern Ireland too St Patrick's day is celebrated, but chiefly by catholics (thirty-one per cent of the population), while the festival associated with the majority protestant population is Orangemen's day (12 July) when William III's victory at the battle of the Boyne(l July 1690 O.S.) is commemorated. Both these festivals are kept as bank holidays in Northern Ireland (though not in the rest of the United Kingdom); the Republic of Ireland, however, extends no recognition to 12 July.

Of all the cities of England and Scotland, Glasgow is most widely associated with sectarianism. As Bill Murray has remarked, the city is renowned for its religion, violence and football, three elements which crystallise in the uniquely bitter encounters between the city’s two major football clubs, Rangers and Celtic. The clubs are identified as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ respectively, although, as Tom Gallagher has commented, supporters’ allegiances tend to be more tribal than doctrinal. Religion is inextricably bound up with nationalism in these sporting contests.

Throughout the nineteenth century, books, pamphlets and periodicals offered widely-ranging advice to the working class. One theme, appearing about 1820, was political economy: ‘Next to religion’, a royal commission reported, ‘the knowledge most important to a labouring man is that of the causes which regulate the amount of his wages, the hours of his work, the regularity of his employment, and the prices of what he consumes’. And Richard Whately, former Drummond Professor of political economy at Oxford, now archbishop of Dublin, urged similarly the need to teach political economy to the poor : ‘The lower orders’, he said, ‘would not … be, as now, liable to the misleading of every designing demagogue … If they were well grounded in the outlines of the science, it would go further towards rendering them provident, than any other scheme that could be devised.’

This article is intended primarily as a contribution to work on the regulation of sexuality in modern Ireland, but, more generally, it attempts to situate the Irish experience within a wider problematic concerning the relations of state and society in the regulation of prostitution. The regulation of sexuality in early twentieth-century Ireland has been a focus of concern for feminist historians in particular, and recent work has clearly demonstrated the salience of questions of gender and sexuality for the politics of the Saorstát. This article is directed at these same concerns, elaborating on a series of proposals to regulate prostitution in the Free State in the mid-1920s. But when discussing prostitution or sex work, the word ‘regulation’ can be used in a quite specific sense, ‘regulationism’ referring to the argument that the state should control venereal disease by registering prostituted women, inspecting them for signs of communicable venereal disease, and incarcerating the contagious in order to protect the health of both nation and state. The history of ‘regulationist’ policies in Europe and beyond allows a point of comparison by which we may understand the specifics of Ireland’s situation in the post-revolutionary era. The history of regulationism, in this technical sense, is a particularly useful context, not least because such policies amply acknowledge ‘the enduring power of the state as the author and executor of regulation’. Particularly important, in ways that suggest a direct parallel to the Irish experience in the early twentieth century, is the coextensive experience of state formation and the regulation of sex work, the most notable example being that of modern Italy.

Lack of information about capital investment constitutes a serious gap in our knowledge of the nineteenth-century Irish economy. It is impossible to decide, for instance, how much truth there is in the almost axiomatic assertion that lack of capital was a major obstacle to Irish economic development until such elementary questions as the identity and motives of investors, the actual amount and timing of investment, and the channels of capital supply are examined. This paper considers some of these problems in connection with railways, the largest consumers of fixed capital in the midnineteenth century.

In recent years there has been a lively historical debate on English perceptions of the Irish. The growth and persistence of ‘racial’ stereotypes that go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which survive even today, have been traced. The Irish, the Catholic Irish above all, were usually perceived in England in an unfavourable or a downright hostile fashion, which reflected the often troubled colonial relationship between England and Ireland. The mass emigration from Ireland to England in the nineteenth century, which brought millions of Irish into direct contact with the English, intensified both the fear of the Irish and the patronising attitudes which accompanied that fear. Historical research has, undoubtedly, added considerably to our understanding of the complexity of anti-Irish feeling: how it depended on class as well as ethnic prejudice; and how it often existed alongside an idealised, sentimental picture of the Catholic Irish as a vigorous and ‘pure’ race, with a culture unsullied by the corrupting influence of modern industrial civilisation.

In 1927 a classic textbook of human genetics made the following remark:

This view was typical of a large constituency of opinion-formers, policy-makers and scientists in the period from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century. Anxiety about the social effects of bad heredity led to the formation of eugenics societies in a considerable number of countries. These included the Eugenics Education Society of London in 1907, the German Society for Race Hygiene in 1905, the American Eugenics Society in 1912, and, in the same year, the French Eugenics Society. By the 1920s eugenics societies could be found in the Soviet Union (a legacy from Tsarist times), Mexico, Scandinavia, Brazil, Japan, and many other countries.

The problems set by the Norman conquest of Ireland which began under Henry II cannot be properly appreciated if they are viewed in isolation. Similar problems had been set by the Norman conquest of England only a hundred years earlier; similar problems existed in Wales. In England, however, the conquest had been both rapid and complete, and problems which were to last throughout the middle ages in Ireland were solved in England by the merging of the two peoples in a relatively short time. Moreover, in England no such clash of laws as was to come about in Ireland had followed the conquest: the Anglo-Saxons had possessed a well-developed system of local administration which was taken over with little or no modification by the Norman kings.

In 1859–60 the Risorgimento culminated in the unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia. Irish public opinion watched the process of unification with intense interest, largely because of the papacy’s involvement. The movement for unification directly threatened Pope Pius IX’s hold over the Papal States, and by 1860 he had lost all his dominions but Rome. As a result, Irish public opinion on the Risorgimento divided along the religious fault-line. Protestant identification with the struggle for unification was mirrored by passionate Catholic support for Pius IX, and Ireland’s longstanding religious animosities were projected onto the struggle between the pope and the Piedmontese. Perugia became Scullabogue, Spoleto Limerick. This sense of identification explains why events in Italy resonated so powerfully in Ireland. For religious ultras on both sides, the Risorgimento was essentially a religious struggle, a strategically important battle in the ongoing war between true religion and the powers of darkness.

The population of Ireland in the eighteenth century experienced serious dearth on twelve occasions. Four of these crises resulted in famines and eight in subsistence crises. The four famines all took place in the first half of the century; the second half experienced only subsistence crises. Because of this, it is sometimes argued that the late eighteenth century enjoyed a ‘gap in famines’. The value of this concept has been questioned because it understates the persistence and impact of dearth at a regional level, but it is also vitiated by our lack of knowledge of the nature and impact of all twelve crises.

The main difference between a famine and a subsistence crisis centres on their contrasting demographic effects. Famines invariably produced substantial increases in mortality; the major famines of 1740–11 and 1845–9, for example, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, while smaller famines, such as those of 1727–9, 1800–01 and 1816–18, which were manifestly less costly in human terms, nevertheless resulted in thousands of deaths. Subsistence crises, on the other hand, caused comparatively little loss of life. We are not currently in a position to identify the precise demographic impact of individual episodes of harvest failure in the late eighteenth century, but based on current understanding it is believed that overall associated mortality levels were low. We can, however, enhance our understanding of dearth in this period by tracing the causes, course, impact and response to individual harvest crises. The purpose of this paper is to describe the crisis of 1782–4; it reveals that harvest failure during the so-called ‘gap in famines’ weighed heavily on both urban and rural populations, but that mortality was kept within acceptable bounds by the efficacy of the poor relief deployed to combat distress. Relief was at its most sophisticated and efficient in urban areas.

The besetting sin of all historical writing is myopia. Large as well as small nations suffer equally from the disheartening insularity of rarely looking beyond the borders of the nation state as geographical borders mutate into mental, cultural and historiographical ones. Myopia's close relative is the unshakeable doctrine of exceptionalism: the assumption that each nation's history is, by definition, sui generis. National histories written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fostered notions of a shared identity and created the sense of an embryonic nation. A critical element in this process was stressing the exceptional characteristics, such as the tradition of liberal governance in Britain, American liberty or the revolutionary origins of the French state. That this history of nations was presented for popular consumption as a story is understandable – story-telling is the most effective method of communicating a narrative to a wide audience.

Discussion of the relationship between Ireland and colonialism has often revolved around similarities and differences between the Irish situation and other, more iconic, examples of colonised societies. This tendency has been partially encouraged by the prominence within Marxian scholarship of dependency theory, which contends that the underdevelopment of colonial societies is due primarily to their integration into the capitalist world economic system. In this analysis, all colonised societies can be characterised by this integration into world capitalism, and consequently share a common source of exploitation and disadvantage. This perspective has often located its source in Marx’s writings on India and, crucially for our current concern, Ireland. This article explores a different perspective on colonialism which the authors believe can be found in Marx’s consideration of the Irish situation.

The land question from the mid-Victorian period to around 1903 looms large in Irish historiography. This is hardly surprising given the fact that, while it was immensely important in its own right, it could not be disentangled from the wider political developments of the time that saw the land and national questions merge. However, with the exception of recent work by Professor David Seth Jones, the land question in post-independence Ireland has been largely overlooked. There seems, in fact, to be a general assumption among political, social and economic historians that there was no land question after 1922, that the land act of the following year defused all potential for future agrarian unrest by completing the transfer of ownership from landlords to tenants.

In the last twenty years women’s history has emerged as a major field of scholarly inquiry. An extensive literature has accumulated on the history of women in western Europe and North America, and the contribution which women have made to many different aspects of western society has been rediscovered. New areas of study have been developed as the gender differences in men’s and women’s lives have been recognised and researched. The expanding secondary literature has also led to a lively debate about the purpose, methodology and theory of women’s history. A central focus of discussion has been the relationship between women’s history and mainstream history. Initially research on the history of women tended to work within the parameters of traditional history: to be fitted into its ‘empty spaces’. But dissatisfaction with the male-centred and patriarchal nature of the predominant historical discourse has led women historians to seek out new methodologies and to argue that consideration of history from the perspective of women, as well as of men, is a major challenge to the whole nature of historical inquiry. As Gerda Lerner, a pioneer of women’s history in the United States, put it, women’s history

Between 1840 and 1914 approximately a third of a million people left Ireland for Australasia. Of this total, New Zealand received a comparatively meagre amount. For instance, when the Irish peaked in sheer numbers in New Zealand in 1886, they supplied just 51,408 of the country’s total population of half a million. Despite such low numbers in comparison with those arriving in other destinations in the Irish diaspora, investigation of the Irish in New Zealand has flourished during the last decade or so. This recent historiography, however, lacks the sustained intensity and depth of work exemplified in other regions of settlement in the diaspora from Ireland. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made in central issues such as the critical importance of kin and neighbourhood networks in the processes of relocation and adaptation from Ireland to New Zealand.

Few of the writings on the more modern history of Ireland, written in the period between the union and the granting of emancipation, may be said to have been the result of original investigation. Neither from the standpoint of sources nor from the manner of presentation were there any obvious signs of development. The general histories by Gordon, Burdy, Taaffe, Lawless, and the rest relied for their facts upon general histories written in the eighteenth century, such as Leland, Warner, Hume or Curry, or upon the authorities cited in these and for the most part re-edited during our period—such as Cambrensis, Spenser, Keating, Ussher and Ware. Indeed, very often the general historians were only too content to rely solely on each other. Thus, Lawless (1814) was greatly indebted to Taaffe (1811), who, in turn, had leaned upon Plowden (1803). And Burdy (1817) was, for all practical purposes, a re-edition of Gordon (1805), even to the very sentences and marginal indications of the contents of paragraphs.

The title of this article is consciously provocative, and thus cries out for immediate explanation and perhaps, in some sense, for the provocation to be disarmed. Why, then, is ‘Was Ireland a colony?’ a bad question - or rather, a question often badly posed? Reasons include the fact that the question is so intertwined with other disputes, including directly political ones, and because there are problems with the term ‘colony’ itself, which has in so many varied contexts been overworked, under-theorised and even under-defined. The oversimplified, stark ‘either/or’ nature of the question is also problematic, when it would be more productive, and perhaps more precise, to think in terms of colonial features in combination with others, if not, indeed, of graduations and degrees of coloniality.

In his recent book dealing with the history of duelling in Ireland, James Kelly comes to the conclusion that eighteenth-century Ireland was essentially ‘a violent society’, peopled at least in part ‘by wilful men who put their individual reputations above their lives, their families, their religion, and the law’. Such comments seem to continue a well-established tradition of interpretation that goes back to the nineteenth century. However, this image of a society in which violence was endemic, and conflict a feature of everyday life, has not gone unquestioned by historians. For example, Thomas Bartlett and Sean Connolly have instead noted the relatively controlled nature of popular protest, the early disappearance of banditry, and the reliance, until the very end of the century, on local enforcement of the law, as possible indications that Ireland may not have been as disorderly a society as has been suggested. These differing interpretations have, in turn, an obvious relevance to the wider debate on how eighteenth-century Ireland should be perceived: as a society irreconcilably and uniquely divided by religious and ethnic conflicts, or as a more or less typical part of the European ancient régime.

The obscurity surrounding Richard’s involvement in his Irish lordship has made it difficult to understand royal policy for Ireland in the 1390s, despite the availability in print of many original sources recording the successes of his first Irish expedition. These documents reveal how Richard in 1394-5 succeeded in winning more wide-spread submissions from Gaelic Ireland than any of his predecessors had done, and that this was the deliberate aim of royal policy cannot seriously be doubted. Historical neglect of this material as evidence on royal policy has resulted from reservations about the political value of Gaelic submission, which, it has been assumed, was the inevitable by-product of any royal visit and a poor alternative to military conquest. This dismissive attitude towards Gaelic submissions to the crown, judged by what they effected rather than what they sought to establish.