This article highlights some of the historiographical trends over the past one hundred years in how the Irish diaspora in early medieval Europe has been studied. The role of the peregrini, the Irish monastic exiles who left Ireland for Britain and continental Europe from the sixth century onwards, has to some extent been marginal and tangential to the historiography of this island. Forms of modern ‘Irophobia’ in some scholarship have also led to an obfuscation of the early medieval religious and ethnic landscape by seeking to minimise Irish cultural influence. The article argues that by contextualising the phenomenon of Irish clerical exile in Europe within broader theological and comparative frameworks, further research in this field has the potential to clarify the influence of the Irish and to show how the experience of exile contributed to the formation of both Irish and European identities in the middle ages.

This article provides a re-appraisal of the land dispute between the lord of Leinster, William Marshal, and the bishop of Ferns, Ailbe Ó Máelmuaid, in the 1210s. In 1215, Ailbe petitioned the pope to solve the dispute, leading to the pronouncement of an interdict and excommunication against the Marshal. It is argued that after King John of England died and the Marshal became regent of England in 1216, the papal stance towards the land dispute changed and the Marshal enjoyed favour in Rome, thus shutting the roads to redress for the bishop of Ferns. Now the most powerful man in the Plantagenet dominions, William Marshal used his position as regent to begin the policy of English discrimination against Gaelic-born bishops for episcopal sees in Ireland. This article uses this dispute as a means of exploring Ireland's position within wider Latin Christendom against the background of the papacy's crusading agenda.

During the brief ‘universal peace’ following the treaty of London in 1518, Surrey's expedition brought to Ireland as chief governor Henry VIII's best general, ostensibly leading a reconnaissance in force to discover how the king might reduce the land to order and obedience. Despite the expedition's protracted planning, as here outlined, the king's aims remained unclear, at least to Surrey. His army spent most of the time garrisoning the Pale and compelling submissions by neighbouring border chiefs. As suggested in a previously unnoticed cache of documents, King Henry hoped the Irish could be persuaded to use English law and the king's courts, restoring crown land since overrun, so that a recovery of the revenues would meet the expedition's costs. When Surrey insisted that Ireland's reform would entail a lengthy and costly military conquest, he soon lost interest. As renewed war threatened in continental Europe, Surrey was instructed to focus on the Pale's defence to reduce the king's costs, so conserving the monarch's treasure for other ‘higher enterprises’. Surrey's short-lived expedition and brief recall disrupted the political stability established by the earl of Kildare's defence of the Pale, with little achieved.

This article presents findings from a fresh examination of a familiar source, shedding new light on the creation of one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the 1641 Irish uprising. It is argued that a text usually regarded as the work of Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore, ought to be understood as the intellectual property of both a team of authors and their sponsors, a New English faction at Dublin Castle with long-standing ambitions to crush popery and entrench planter hegemony in Ireland. It is argued that this group's objective was to strengthen the hand of the populist ‘junto’ at Westminster, led by John Pym, that was wrestling with Charles I for political and constitutional supremacy in English affairs in the winter and spring of 1641–2. The colonialists contributed to this metropolitan revolution by rendering safe to handle the Irish rebels’ politically-explosive seditious slander that their uprising had been raised by royal command. The notorious falsehood of the rebels’ claims has obscured the demonstrably underhand and fundamentally deceitful calculation with which the colonialists helped introduce it into mainstream English political culture, in order to isolate the king further and weaken his personal authority on both sides of the Irish Sea.

This article explores the legal strategies of negotiation employed by Gaelic lords in early modern Munster through a case study of the O'Driscoll lordship of Collymore, County Cork. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced an environment of intense legal contestation, as indigenous legal practices and hierarchies were methodically attacked by the colonial administration. But, as English administrators attempted to eradicate Irish legal precedent (and with it the legitimacy of the Gaelic aristocracy), Gaelic lords responded with new and often innovative legal strategies. The territory of Collymore presents a microcosm of the legal tensions produced by and under the Munster plantation, subject to competing claims by rival O'Driscoll heirs, MacCarthy Reagh overlords, ‘Old English’ neighbours and incoming planters. This article offers a reconstruction and analysis of the complex legal disputes surrounding Collymore. It argues that through otherwise routine legal interactions like inheritance disputes and chancery suits, Irish lords reframed their authority in the vocabulary of English law, trading tanistry for primogeniture and the language of overlordship for that of landlordship. Through these rhetorical and theoretical shifts, they attempted to redefine the very basis and nature of their authority.

Irish soldiers demobilised in London after major eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century wars were an important but overlooked source of unintentional Irish migrants to the capital. Their migration was linked to the centralised military pension system, which meant that servicemen in English regiments had to present themselves for a medical examination at Chelsea or Greenwich hospitals — both in the London area. A lack of provision available to then get these often very disabled and wounded men back home to Ireland meant that many stayed semi-permanently or permanently in London, and their presence can be measured decades later in the 1841 census. This challenges current understandings about the Irish diaspora in Britain by highlighting the role of the government in shepherding Irish men across the Irish Sea.

The Irish Ordnance memoir scheme attempted to produce wide-ranging ‘statistical’ memoirs on a national basis, to accompany the large-scale (six-inch) mapping of the country by the Irish Ordnance Survey. Dating to the early 1830s, the memoir scheme had a stop-start existence and only published a specimen account for the parish of Templemore, County Londonderry (1837). But the scheme's overall aims of economic improvement and cultural revival attracted considerable support from Irish society and the Irish press. Public calls for resumption after memoir activity was stopped in 1840 led to an investigatory commission of 1843–4, appointed by the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, but the commission's favourable findings were then disputed by him, primarily on grounds of cost. This article examines the impact of the Edinburgh publishing house of William Blackwoods on the memoir commission. The first section investigates the influence of Scottish voluntaryism on the commission, while the second assesses the impact of the firm on the emerging publication proposals in the immediate aftermath of the report. The article argues that the memoir scheme was not a victim of British antipathy but expired from a failure of the principals, including Blackwoods, to agree publishing terms, and both assesses and contextualises the scheme's demise from this adjusted perspective.

The assessment tax on land, which paid the occupying army, increased steadily during the 1650s, and soon out-stripped the capacity of the Irish economy, slowly recovering from over a decade of war. Matters came to a head in 1657, when there were efforts by Irish M.P.s at Westminster to reduce the rate, and also pressure from Protestant landowners on the Dublin government to change the way in which the tax was administered. These initiatives brought together landowners from very different backgrounds and from all four provinces, in a coordinated campaign of lobbying which achieved considerable gains in Dublin but was less successful in London. This article uses new evidence to explore the problems endemic within the assessment system, the way in which influence could be brought to bear, and the difficulties encountered by those trying to change policies imposed from across the Irish Sea.

Sylvester O'Halloran was a prominent surgeon in late eighteenth-century Limerick. He wrote extensively on medicine, history and antiquarianism. His contribution to medicine included a series of monographs on eye disease, limb amputation and head injury. Of these many publications only his work on head injury was of clinical significance. His proposals to standardise the training and assessment of surgeons in Ireland were reflected in the procedures of the County Infirmaries Board and likely inspired the curriculum of the newly founded Royal College of Surgeons in 1784. This article reflects on O'Halloran's medical career, suggesting that his impact on practice was modest but his proposals on surgical education contributed to the professionalisation of surgery in Ireland in the eighteenth century.

On 13 February 1922, an unidentified person threw a bomb into Weaver Street, which was full of Catholic children at play, killing four children and two women. The bombing became a locus of political controversy between the British government, the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State and the government of Northern Ireland, and became the archetypal story of innocent Catholic lives taken by the intercommunal conflict in the six counties which became Northern Ireland in 1920‒22. This article seeks to contribute to the understanding of the role of this intercommunal conflict in Irish and British politics, using the Weaver Street bombing as a case study. This article analyses nationalist representation of the conflict as an orchestrated campaign against Catholics, ‘a pogrom’; unionist representation of the conflict as loyalist self-defence against the I.R.A.; and the British government's effort to publicly maintain neutrality in the conflict.

Intelligence played a critical role in the Irish War of Independence, though debate remains about the effectiveness of British information-gathering. Historians have focused largely on the intelligence war in Dublin. This article examines British Army intelligence in the 6th Division area (roughly the southern third of the island). It will contextualise British military intelligence before the conflict and traces the slow development of an intelligence organisation in the 6th Division. It then considers the sources and nature of British information gathering, particularly interrogation of prisoners and the collection and analysis of captured documents. Military intelligence summaries and a ‘Blacklist’ of I.R.A. suspects across the 6th Division are used to ascertain the quality of military intelligence products during the final stages of the conflict. The ‘Blacklist’ can be contrasted with I.R.A. unit arrest data and leadership lists, to assess the effectiveness of British military intelligence at a county level. This comparison provides a new measure of British performance, clearly revealing the limitations of British military intelligence in the 6th Division, particularly when compared to relatively more successful results achieved by crown forces in the Dublin District.

Recent historiography gives an increasingly nuanced picture of interactions between religion and wider society in nineteenth-century Ireland. Yet, when considering the relationships between religion and philanthropy, something central to everyday life in urban centres, emphasis is still placed on the role of the institutional Catholic Church, and there is a sense that lay Catholics were less involved in charity than their Protestant counterparts. Connected with this is the idea that Protestant charities used open forms of governance, but Catholic charities were secretive, an assertion that parallels claims about tensions between Catholicism and democracy. This historiography, however, also suggests that the situation in the early nineteenth century may have been different from later in the century. This article compares small-scale Catholic and Protestant parochial charities in early nineteenth-century Dublin, while also considering similar institutions associated with Presbyterian congregations in Edinburgh. It indicates that some Catholic parochial charities were at least as committed to open procedures and lay participation as their Anglican and Presbyterian counterparts. By exploring these charities and making comparisons, the article shows that some of Dublin's middle-class Catholics were dedicated to the same ideals as early nineteenth-century British reformers.

The World Cultures collection at National Museums Northern Ireland is an essential source for the study of Irish collecting in the wider British Empire. The 2022 redisplay of the collection in the Ulster Museum's exhibition, Inclusive Global Histories, is part of a staged engagement with local and source communities. Given the critical importance of the global museum decolonisation work of which the exhibition is an example, a fresh consideration of this ethnographic collection's history is timely. This article reviews the collection within the context of the three museums that have housed it, and investigates how curators within the institution understood, represented and displayed the collection. It does so through a case study of a war canoe (tomako), that was taken from the Solomon Islands, by John Casement, a captain in the Royal Navy, and is the largest and among the most significant items within the collection. The canoe's centrality to the gallery — built around it in 1925 — that now contains Inclusive Global Histories reveals complex social networks between nineteenth- and twentieth-century collectors, curators and photographers, and aids understanding of how global human cultures have been regarded in Northern Ireland's civic life.

This paper explores the foundation of the Dublin Horse Show from 1868–80, when it was held at the Royal Dublin Society's (R.D.S.) headquarters on Merrion Square. Early iterations were intended to address the depletion of the equine population in the mid-nineteenth century, a matter of concern for agriculture and industry, but also for those with an interest in sport and horses as opportunities for leisure. Horse shows arose nearly simultaneously in Ireland and England as intersections between associational culture, agricultural improvement and a burgeoning middle-class leisure sphere established animal shows as instruments for improving breeding, but also as forms of entertainment. The popular success of horse shows fostered the development of economic clusters, as local businesses began to depend on them as reliable sources of annual income. They also reflected equestrian sport's migration from largely elite pursuits into popular recreation, including competitions that would eventually lead to the modern sport of showjumping. The events established at the early R.D.S. Horse Show are still recognisable today in their combination of improvement and leisure based in the promotion of Irish horses as exemplars of sporting excellence.

The last fifty years have witnessed the production of a large body of scholarship exploring the political and social history of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath. Debate has focused principally on the administrative abilities and democratic credentials of the Free State government and the extent to which revolutionary ideals were expressed institutionally following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. However, there has been strikingly little attempt to contextualise, rather than appraise, the lineage of the moral and ideological assumptions embedded in the executive council's public professions of political conviction, or to understand Treatyite policy-making on its own terms. In particular, historians have tended to weigh and measure the performance of the Cumann na nGaedheal government against anachronistic and moralising definitions of what the Irish revolution stood for at the expense of any systematic attempt to reconstruct the manner in which relevant historical actors understood this relationship. Focusing on the heterodox intellectual firmament of the Irish-Ireland movement, this paper demonstrates that the Cumann na nGaedheal government never abandoned the political languages of the revolution; rather, they constructed an ideology to support the new state rooted in their own interpretation of what they considered revolutionary ideals of Irish-Ireland nationalism.