Athough abundant evidence is available for the first few years of the Anglo-Norman invasion, the observance of due proportion in the ordinary textbook of Irish history usually precludes a detailed presentation of the progress of the invasion prior to the arrival of Henry II in 1171. As this has tended to obscure the real significance of the invasion, a careful analysis of the course of events in the years 1167-71 is called for.

State-sponsored plantations were an instrument in the anglicisation of Irish society from the late 1550s, and the plantation in 1620 of the Gaelic O’Rourke lordship in Leitrim represents a stage in the development of plantation policy. With the exception of a valuable overview by Victor Treadwell, focusing on the involvement of the first duke of Buckingham, historians have largely neglected the Leitrim plantation. This study seeks to explore the programme for the anglicisation of native society in the area, as illustrated in the plantation instructions. Aspirations will be compared with what can be gleaned of the actual implementation of the plantation, drawing largely on the official documentation and correspondence generated by the 1622 commission of inquiry, which was established because of unease with various aspects of state performance in Ireland, including the condition of the plantations. In the case of Leitrim, such concern was amply justified. A further theme is the impact of the plantation on the native population, and especially on the smaller freeholders who were dispossessed under the plantation. Through the natives’ complaints and other material, the 1622 documentation affords rare insights into the impact of the plantation on Gaelic society. Finally, to assess the success of the plantation, the development of the settler community to 1641 will be briefly outlined.

The Irish house of commons in the eighteenth century was composed of 300 members: two were elected by each of the 32 counties; two by 117 boroughs; and two by Trinity College, Dublin. Only protestants were returned, for by an English act of 1691 all members of the Irish house of commons were required to take oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Catholics could still exercise the franchise until 1727, but an act of that year deprived them of the right to vote. The dissenters were equally excluded: a clause in an act of 1704 requiring all office-holders to receive communion according to the usage of the established church excluded them from the corporations and indirectly from the house of commons. Even the minority that remained was very inadequately represented.

In the counties the leading landlords were able to influence the return of members, and many of the Irish boroughs were quite as rotten as any in England prior to 1832. Bannow in co. Wexford, for example, was a mountain of sea-sand without a single inhabited house; at Clonmines in the same county there was one solitary house; at Harristown in co. Kildare there was none. A traveller in Ireland in 1755 found Naas ‘a shabby looking place’; Castle Dermot ‘a very poor town’; Callen ‘a poor dirty town, interspersed with the numerous ruins of old castles and religious houses’; Rathcormac ‘a poor borough’; and Kilmallock ‘a spacious street, composed of houses, which, though magnificent, were windowless and roofless’. The conclusion he came to was: ‘Happy would it be for Ireland, if her corporate towns were divested of the privilege of returning representatives to the great council of the nation; for it becomes the selfish policy of the lord of the soil to impoverish the voters into compliance’.

The depth of change which the country experienced in the reign of James I has become an axiom of early modern Irish historiography. The extension of crown government throughout the island, the flight of the northern earls, the subsequent plantation in Ulster and the putative religious reformation of the indigenous inhabitants contributed to a climate of flux and tension. The burgeoning scholarly interest in this phase of Irish history has resulted in a more detailed understanding of administrative, political, regional and religious trends in the period. Progress has also been made in the study of contemporary mentalities. An interesting development has been the use of sources in the Irish language for the reconstruction of previously obscure intellectual currents amongst the Gaelic élite. The recent appearance of Michelle O Riordan’s monograph on the Gaelic reaction to the collapse of traditional society represents the fullest exposition yet of an interpretation which has characterised the early modern Gaelic ideological response to conquest and social change as fundamentally passive and backward-looking. O Riordan has, in effect, elaborated upon the conclusions of preceding commentators, notably Tom Dunne and Bernadette Cunningham, in portraying the Gaelic understanding of socio-political transformation as lacking in critical perception. This essay is intended as a further contribution to the elucidation of the mental climate of the time. More particularly, it will focus on two themes which figured prominently in the separate, but in this instance similar, communal reactions of the Gaelic Irish and the New English settlers to their respective political and social environments.

The establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3, once regarded as a watershed in Irish constitutional history, has more recently and quite properly been reduced to an achievement of modest proportions. According to the new historiographical orthodoxy, Irish legislative independence was an aberration in a period of increasing British political control, and one that actually encouraged the British ruling class to pursue the political assimilation of Ireland into Britain by means of a union. Historians now have a tolerably clear picture of the process by which William Pitt and the British executive gradually became convinced that an incorporating union provided the best solution to the constitutional anomalies and sectarian difficulties posed by the government of Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s.

Late in 1868 the Dublin doctor, author and nationalist George Sigerson (c. 1836–1925) published, under the title Modern Ireland, a collection of widely quoted articles he had written for the Daily Chronicle during the previous year. Among the bewildering flood of Irish commentary on British rule, his was notable for its clear exposition and its moderate tone. From the perspective of the Liberal Party, on the verge of being returned to office, Sigerson’s observations were valuable in representing the views of a moderate, middle-class Irish element which might co-operate in implementing a liberal policy acceptable to all parties in both England and Ireland. His credentials as a nationalist were impeccable, yet he had not been seduced by the Fenian inclination towards violence. The book prompted modest praise from critics and enjoyed a reasonable success in the book trade, going through several printings and two editions.

One man who read the first edition was John Wodehouse, first earl of Kimberley (1826–1902), the immediate past viceroy of Ireland, who annotated profusely as he read. His notes are unusual in that they are extensive (52 of 393 pages were annotated), spread throughout the text, and generally lengthy (averaging twenty words per annotated page). A few involve the kinds of ethnically disparaging remarks to which he was prone. However, the majority deal with substantive issues with which Kimberley as viceroy had had to deal (Fenianism and land improvement) or would be dealing later that year as part of Gladstone’s first government (disestablishment and land reform).

In June 1569 an English gentleman named Robert Mainwaring was seized on the borders of County Carlow by Irish rebels. They forced a noose around his neck, tightened it, and proceeded to drag him ‘up and down in a halter’, like a man condemned to be hanged. As with many terrorist acts, Mainwaring’s degradation was a carefully calculated publicity stunt, and it quickly achieved its objective. News of his predicament was relayed to London, where the identity of his captors aroused widespread alarm in government circles. He was persecuted on the orders of Sir Edmund Butler of Cloghgrenan, a leading Anglo-Irish lord who was the brother and principal heir of the then childless tenth earl of Ormond, Thomas Butler, and the recent recipient of some generous grants of land and office from the crown. Despite Sir Edmund’s position as deputy governor of the hitherto loyal Ormond lordship in Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary, it soon became clearthat his seizure of Mainwaring had signalled the outbreak of a general revolt by several branches of the Butler family.

Since the work of Beer, or at least since the studies of Andrews and Harper, no serious historian has failed to recognize that the British mercantile system did not bear too heavily upon the American colonies before 1763. In the first place, some regulations either directly and intentionally, or indirectly and unintentionally, fostered colonial development. In the second place, enforcement was often so lax and evasion so common that a number of regulations Lvere practically inoperative. Yet though the beneficent effects of ‘salutary neglect’ upon the American colonies have long been accepted, writers on Irish history have continued to assume that the mercantile system was applied to Ireland with devastating effectiveness. Was this indeed true? Or was British mercantilism in Ireland mitigated in the same ways as in the overseas colonies —by compensating advantages and by evasion? The present article concerns itself only with the latter point, the question of enforcement and evasion of British restrictions on Irish trade.

Modern colonialism, writes Gyan Prakash, ‘instituted enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges — the colonizer and the colonized, the Occidental and the Oriental, the civilized and the primitive, the scientific and the superstitious, the developed and the underdeveloped’. Such dichotomies ‘reduced complex differences and interactions to the binary (self/other) logic of colonial power’, and colonial rulers ‘constituted the “native” as their inverse image’. Such perceptions of difference as ‘other’ expressed what ‘civilized’ Westerners believed themselves not to be — but also what they feared they might become, should they lose rational self-control. The ‘other’, writes Eva Kornfelt, ‘threatens the integrity of the self by offering alternative, unrealized, and suppressed possibilities’. As shown by Western fascination with the ‘noble savage’, this process could sometimes produce positive representations. Yet even these expressed the needs of the perceiver rather than the reality of the perceived. ‘Othering’, then, is a complex process, one implying deep cultural and individual needs, which may occasionally result in accurate representations, but more often produces self-justifying positive/negative dichotomies.

During the twentieth century, Ireland, north and south, was infiltrated to varying degrees by a transnational quasi-religious and political movement, Moral Re-Armament (M.R.A.). From its founding in the early 1920s by an American evangelist and former Lutheran pastor, Frank Buchman, through the peak of moral revivalism in the 1930s, its Cold War work after 1945 and its reinvention as a secular, multi-faith, reconciliation organisation in the 1960s, this article examines M.R.A.'s structural and ideological origins and its evolution in Ireland, the U.S. and Britain. Based on primary source materials, it argues that Ireland, characterised by two ideologically narrow cultural and political monoliths, was not immune to external spiritual and quasi-political influences and that M.R.A.'s activities in Ireland confirm these distinctive religious and political cultures while also revealing similarities. Moreover, it reveals that non-governmental M.R.A. adherents were in advance of governments in their desire for peaceful solutions to the Irish partition issue and the Cold War more generally. The article, therefore, examines an international movement which had personal, national and global significance within the context of transnational religious, political and foreign policy studies as well as the national narratives of Northern Ireland and Ireland.

Since the late 1980s crusade historiography has shown increasing interest in the periphery of Europe and the less ‘traditional’ crusading areas of Scotland, Wales, Poland and Scandinavia. Consideration of Ireland has formed part of this spread of interest, but, like many other areas, it remains comparatively unstudied. In part, the paucity of Irish texts relating to all kinds of crusading discourages research, as does the comparatively low number of known Irish crucesignati.

The year 1857 saw the first of the great riot commissions which provided much source material for Belfast history. It should be read as a continuation of the street conflict of that summer. Careful reading shows the skill with which the weak Catholic/Liberal alliance of the city managed the flow of witnesses and the naiveté of the Orange/Protestant lawyers. The Catholic/Liberal side ‘won’ the inquiry, achieving their aim of convincing the Dublin government that the local police force was ineffective if not sectarian and that Orange Order culture and evangelical street preaching was responsible for the disorder. Practical outcomes were limited. Resources were limited due to demands in other parts of Ireland and the process of taking first-class troops from Ireland to deal with the Indian mutiny. Considered in light of theories of ‘civil society’, the court was a means of countering the imperfections of representative government. Considered in the context of Ireland as a whole, events demonstrated the weakness of the Dublin authorities, their ignorance of Belfast and the importance of the resident magistrate. Much was concealed from the inquiry. The following months revealed evidence of an active Ribbon-style organisation, and the animosity of the local police and the constabulary. Attention to working class sectarianism diverted attention from elite failure to manage the class relationships of a fractured civil society.

In October 1912, Alfred Stead, who had succeeded his father, the veteran journalist, W. T. Stead, as editor of the Review of Reviews, after the elder Stead’s death on the Titanic during the preceding April, found Stead’s memorandum of his interview with John Redmond, in December 1906, among his father’s papers. In view of the current crisis of the Irish home rule bill, Alfred Stead planned to publish the memorandum under the title ‘What Mr Redmond thought : special interview by Mr W. T. Stead’ in the November issue of the Review of Reviews, and on 7 October, posted page proof of the interview to Redmond with a note requesting Redmond to inform him ‘whether there are any points which are not in accord with … [his] … remembrance of this interview’.

If the major themes in Irish history during these years were the progressive decline of the protestant ascendancy, the rise of a catholic middle class, the growth of agrarian and urban popular politics and the social and economic consequences of a swelling population, then it would be generally assumed that parliamentary electioneering—at least until the passage of catholic emancipation in 1829—had very little to do with them. Supporters of such an assumption would argue that elections were largely the preserve of an élite—the protestant ascendancy—and that despite catholic enfranchisement in 1793 and the pruning of the most notorious close and rotten boroughs by the act of union, electioneering in Ireland was largely confined to wearisome bargaining between landlords, excessive drilling of freeholders both genuine and fictitious, unbecoming scrambles for Castle patronage and the almost indecent disposal of such ill-gotten gains amongst squads of dependents. Furthermore they might add as a confirmatory postscript, that the disfranchisement of the 40s.

The first act of the Irish parliamentary session of 1697 provided for the banishment of all catholic clergy exercising ecclesiastical jurisdiction and also of all regular clergy. It was the first act since the treaty of Limerick that directly affected the practice of the catholic religion in Ireland, and it was something of a paradox that it should have coincided with the making of peace between William III and Louis XIV. In its early stages the bill seems to have been confined to the regular clergy, and there is some obscurity about its extension to bishops and other clerical dignitaries.

The value of the Irish Registry of Deeds as a source, particularly for social and economic historians, has long been underestimated. It first received serious consideration in a lecture delivered to the Conference of Irish Historians in 1943 by Mr Samuel Weir. Mr Weir’s estimate of the usefulness of this source ran as follows : ‘while making no claim that the documents preserved in the Registry of Deeds are primarily of historical value, it is claimed that they can be of immense value as corroborative evidence’. This guarded, almost apologetic statement was typical of the diffident attitude towards the registry which prevailed among historians both then and for some time thereafter.

This article examines the causes and consequences of the 1922 postal strike which was the first nationwide strike to occur following the establishment of the Irish Free State. In the eyes of the government, the dispute was as much a threat to its authority as that posed by anti-Treatyies, and it was resolved to crush both. The significance of the postal dispute within the annals of Irish labour history has been obscured and overshadowed by the civil war. The strike was not only about a demand for a fair and reasonable wage: it also raised issues relating to workers’ rights, including the right to strike; government tactics, including the harassment and intimidation of workers by the military; victimisation; political propriety and probity; the abuse of government power; and the role and effectiveness of the labour movement. Furthermore, the historical collision of both the postal strike and the civil war produced strong emotions among all parties to this labour dispute – the postal workers, postal unions and the fledgling government. The coincidence of the dispute and the civil war determined the government's attitude towards labour unrest, labour affairs and labour relations until Fianna Fáil succeeded Cumann na nGaedheal in 1932.

A hitherto unpublished text of a negotiated settlement between Walter de Lacy, lord of Meath (d. 1241), and the canons of St Thomas's Abbey, Dublin, relating to the church of Ardmulchan in County Meath sheds new light both on the career of Theobald Walter I (d. 1205), ancestor of the Butler earls of Ormond, and on the dealings of John, son of King Henry II of England, with his Irish lordship during the period 1185–99 for which sources are scarce. It indicates that not only in Leinster, but also in Meath, John encroached on the seigneurial rights of Anglo-Norman landholders.