The celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the two societies, the Irish Historical Society and the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, suggests that, having looked backwards over the achievements of the first forty years, we may look forward to what might be done in the comparable future.

The main achievements of these societies, the promoting of objective Irish history and the maintaining of a common cultural outlook on Irish history, were secured by the admission of Ireland as a cultural entity to the international historical organisation, the Comité International des Sciences Historiques.

The great tradition of the Buachailli Bána in the south of Ireland had its small beginnings on the Tipperary side of the Knockmealdown mountains during the closing months of 1761. ‘ Their first rise was in October last,’ a Youghal gentleman told his son in London in April 1762, ‘ and they have ever since been increasing;… they always assembled in the night with their shirts over their clothes, which caused them to be called Whiteboys. ’ The exactions of tithe-farmers and the enclosure of commonage sparked the initial oath-bound combination in the district between Clogheen and Ballyporeen. A recently installed tithe-farmer named Dobbyn, who kept an inn at Ballyporeen, issued the novel demand that local catholic couples pay him a fee of 5s. when they married before a priest. Among those who vehemently denounced this new tax was Fr Nicholas Sheehy, the outspoken, socially committed young parish priest of Shanrahan; Fr Sheehy had already attracted the disapproving notice of local protestant ministers and magistrates by opposing the collection of church rates when he was stationed in the parish of Newcastle, and by proclaiming the excommunication of the inhabitants of the town of Mitchelstown and the parish of Brigown Fant, who was later convicted of riot and trespass and sentenced to a fine of £50 and two years in prison, seemed a rather pathetic and improbable leader of an agrarian movement. But the action of the crowd he had harangued at Kilmallock proved contagious. From there the disturbances spread northwards to the districts of Bruff, Hospital, and Caherconlish. Bodies of Levellers, collected by the blowing of horns, mobilised ‘ in great numbers ’ and fired guns as they marched along in their white shirts, ‘ demolishing in the night time the fences of the inclosures ’ of many persons and ‘ swearing fidelity to each other and secrecy ’.

The primary aim of this paper is to assess the role of the Roman Catholic clergy in agricultural co-operative development, drawing on evidence from the last decade of the 19th and the early decades of the 20th century. It is hardly possible, however, to treat such activity in isolation from the manifold preoccupations of rural society, as in practice no clear demarcation existed between economic and non-economic activity. An attempt is made to place such clerical activity in the cultural context of rural society, while simultaneously paying attention to the specific ideological, pastoral and economic pre-occupations of the clergy, and while treating the latter as a distinctive social category with affiliations both within and beyond the rural community.