bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
La trahison des clercs:British intellectuals and the first home–rule crisis
Authors: Dunne Tom
Published: August 2016

In the early months of 1882 two of the writers who were to be prominent four years later in opposing Gladstone’s first Irish home-rule bill made similar complaints to correspondents about the state of British public opinion. ‘Less is thought of the Irish question than of the Australian cricketers’, wrote Goldwin Smith; while in characteristic vein, James Fitzjames Stephen waxed choleric about the ‘extravagant idiocy’ of a public obsessed with ‘Jumbo the elephant’, while ignoring ‘one of the most disgusting and brutally dangerous civil wars ever known in these islands’. Each had a particular reason to be preoccupied about Ireland. Smith’s pique was, in part at least, that of the ‘expert’ whose warnings and admonitions had gone unheeded, while Stephen lived part of each year on his small estate in County Louth. However, they also reflected a general concern among politicians and intellectuals which historians have tended to ignore or underestimate — a belief that trends and events in Ireland and the British response to them had serious implications for the future of Britain itself. The recent major study of the home-rule crisis of 1885-6 by Alistair Cooke and John Vincent is remarkable in British historiographical treatment of the Irish question only in the way in which the normal presuppositions are made explicit. Cooke and Vincent argue with admirable clarity, and in remarkable detail, that virtually none of the politicians involved in the crisis were concerned with the ostensible issues of the home-rule policy, each being exclusively concerned instead with exploiting the political crisis which Gladstone’s adoption of the policy (also purely for tactical political reasons) had created. This denial of any importance to ideological differences in political crises is a characteristic of the so-called ‘high politics’ school of historiography, and constitutes perhaps its most serious defect. It is reinforced in the case of the Irish home-rule crisis by the view that, as it was undoubtedly true that few among the political élite cared about Ireland as such, they were equally indifferent to the issues it raised. However, not alone can it be argued that there were important ideological dimensions to most political crises in late nineteenth-century Britain, there is considerable evidence to show that this was particularly true of those involving Irish questions, and of home rule above all.
The ‘blessed turf’: cholera and popular panic in Ireland, June 1832
Authors: Connolly S.J.
Published: August 2016

On 11 June 1832 Humphrey O’Sullivan, a schoolteacher living in Callan, County Kilkenny, made the following entry in his diary:

The lower classes of the Irish are a credulous people. Some practical joker sent a fool out with a small piece of charred stick, or some other bit of kindling, which had been extinguished in Easter-water, or holy water, and told him to divide it into four parts, and give it to four persons in four houses, telling them that the cholera would kill them unless each one of them did the same thing. By this means 16 persons, and 64, and 256, and 1,024, and 4,096 etc., etc., got this fire, until the entire country was a laughing stock for protestants.

O’Sullivan did not exaggerate. The events which he described were part of a remarkable popular panic which in the space of six days swept across the greater part of Ireland, from County Wexford in the south-east to County Donegal in the north-west, and from County Cork to the outskirts of Dublin city. It was an episode regarded by some contemporary observers with amused condescension, by others with deep alarm. For the modern historian it offers a brief but vivid insight into the mental world of a section of the catholic population in pre-Famine Ireland, and an opportunity to document in detail features of that mental world which are rarely reflected in conventional historical records.
The regional bibliography of Irish America, 1800–1930: a review and addendum
Authors: Doyle David Noel
Published: August 2016

John V. Kelleher of Harvard remarked to me in October 1982: ‘I used to think I knew a little about the Irish in America. Now I realise I just knew a lot about the Irish in Lawrence.’ The pioneer and comprehensive bibliography by Seamus Metress of Toledo underscores what scholars of Irish America now perhaps generally recognise.

Virtually all general treatment of Irish America, as of so many other topics in American history, has been flawed by premature generalisation. The pressures to simplify a sub-topic such as Irish America have been understandable and considerable, given the multiform character of national development. Nonetheless, half a century or more after general historians have taken account of America’s pluralism, regionalism and political decentralisation, scholars attempting an overview of Irish America have inclined to the shortcut. Assuming that the body of Irish-Americans are today found in Boston, New York city and Philadelphia, they have tended to discuss the political, social and religious history of the community as though these cities and their past encapsulated it. A demurrer has come from Chicago; but its scholars have in turn tended to correct the picture with an eye to their own particular experience. As a result, most general treatments bear the hallmark of their origin: those of Daniel Moynihan, William Shannon, George Potter, Thomas N. Brown and Oscar Handlin being shaped by the assumptions of the Atlantic urban seabord; those of L. J. McCaffrey, Andrew Greeley and Ernest Levine by a Chicago counter-emphasis. More seriously, recent attempts to establish a more scientific methodology for the study of Irish and other immigrant groups, as pioneered by Stephan Thernstrom in 1964 and mushrooming since then, have been biased toward this east-coast selectivity of the more traditional historians. Thus, minute studies of occupational mobility, marriage and fertility patterns, working lives and community concentration and dispersal have assumed, and even asserted, the representativeness of east coast experience, especially that of New England; no fewer than eleven Massachusetts cities have enjoyed full-scale academic study of their Irish proletariats.
The writing of Irish medieval history
Authors: Cosgrove Art
Published: August 2016

This paper has been prompted by two recent articles in Irish Historical Studies. Both are by distinguished historians from outside Ireland — Professor Michael Richter from Germany (to which he has recently returned) and Dr Steven G. Ellis from England — who have spent many years teaching in the history departments of University College, Dublin, and University College, Galway, respectively. Their different backgrounds and experiences enable them to bring fresh perspectives to bear upon the history of medieval Ireland and have led them to question some traditional assumptions about the Irish past. Here I should confess that coming as I do from Northern Ireland I am something of an outsider myself, and my own origin and background must inevitably influence my interpretation of the past.

Professor Richter took the opportunity granted by a review of an important collection of essays to challenge ‘the unquestioned assumption that the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland marked a turning point in Irish history’. Arguing that the event should be seen in a wider context, both geographical and chronological, he suggested that a close parallel to the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland is provided by the German expansion into western Slav territories and that a comparison with the Scandinavian impact in the three centuries prior to 1169 would help to get the importance of the English in medieval Ireland into perspective.
The estate of Cú Chonnacht Maguire of Tempo: a case history from the Williamite land settlement
Authors: Maguire W.A.
Published: August 2016

As J.G. Simms remarked more than thirty years ago in the introduction to his notable book on the subject, ‘the Williamite confiscation was the last of a series which in the course of a century and a half changed the ownership of the greater part of Ireland’. The Williamite confiscation in Ireland, 1690–1703 was a landmark in the complicated and, till then, much misunderstood history of the subject. In fact, and rather oddly considering the importance of the war of 1689–91 and its consequences, there was no earlier detailed account of the confiscation of Irish land that followed the defeat of the Jacobites at the Boyne, Aughrim, and Limerick; and most references to it were based upon the printed report of the parliamentary commissioners of 1699, in some important respects a highly tendentious and misleading document. Simms based his work upon manuscript sources not previously used: the detailed records of the 1699 commissioners; the records of the forfeiture trustees who succeeded them; and the Books of Survey and Distribution that recorded the ownership of Irish land and its redistribution during the years after 1641. His main general conclusions —

that the treaty of Limerick and the dispute between William and his English commons made the confiscation much less comprehensive than it would otherwise have been; but that many of the catholics who thus succeeded in retaining their estates were induced to change their faith in the course of the eighteenth century by the pressure of the penal laws

— have provided all later students of the subject with a firm frame of reference within which to examine the details of the settlement.
Anglo-Irish constitutional relations in the later eighteenth century
Authors: Beckett J.C.
Published: August 2016

Few periods of Irish history have been more extensively written about than the later eighteenth century: a mere list of books and papers dealing with the Volunteer movement, ‘Grattan's parliament’, the insurrection of 1798 and the legislative union of 1800 would make up a moderate-sized volume. Most of these writings are concerned, directly or indirectly, with the constitutional relationship between Ireland and Great Britain. Indeed, it might be said that this relationship is the basic theme in the Irish history of the period, even for social and economic historians; and the pattern is so well-established that it may well seem rash to assume that it can be substantially modified, or even made significantly clearer, except, perhaps, by the production of new and hitherto unsuspected evidence. Yet there is something to be said for looking again at the whole subject on the basis of our existing knowledge, not simply, as Irish historians are inclined to do, from the standpoint of Ireland, nor yet as if events in Ireland were a mere appendage to British history, but rather, as Professor Butterfield has done for one brief period in his George III, Lord North and the people, to consider Anglo-Irish constitutional relations during the late eighteenth century as part of the general political history of the British Isles.
Spain and the invasion of Ireland, 1601–2
Authors: Silke John J.
Published: August 2016

References in the consultas on Ireland in the Simancas archives continually remind the student of the larger background against which the invasion of 1601–2 took place. It was a background in which the emphasis insofar as Spanish foreign relations were concerned was on disengagement. But while Spain had concluded peace with France, sent out overtures to England, was seeking to extricate herself from the costly Dutch war and conducted negotiations even with Constantinople, she yet maintained a jealous care for her greatness. Thus war with France threatened to erupt over Savoy; Spain continued support to Archduke Albert, sovereign of the Netherlands, in his struggle against the United Provinces; she sought to support the emperor's eastern war against the Turk by attacking the Berbers in the Mediterranean; and she tried to extract better peace terms from England by creating a diversion in Ireland.
John Dillon and the Plan of Campaign, 1886–90
Authors: Lyons F.S.L.
Published: August 2016

There is a sense in which the home rule debates of 1886 were less the climax of than a deviation from the logical and predictable development of Irish politics in the Parnellite period. Had home rule been achieved, no doubt all would have been changed, and an autonomous Irish parliament would have addressed itself enthusiastically to solving the country's social and economic problems. But in the absence of home rule these problems immediately resumed the centre of the stage and the chief of them, the settlement of the land question, became again the crucial issue in Anglo-Irish relations. For some people, indeed, it had remained the crucial issue even during the ‘home rule’ winter of 1885–6, when the position on the Clanricarde estates in Galway, already notoriously bad, perceptibly worsened and when pressure was brought to bear both upon the Irish National League and upon the parliamentary party itself to adopt a more warlike posture towards rack-renting and evicting landlords.
Seventeenth-Century Ireland (1603-1702)
Authors: Simms J.G.
Published: August 2016

The seventeenth century was a period of great changes in Ireland. There were successive transfers of land from catholic to protestant ownership; political and administrative power passed into the hands of a ‘new English’ minority. Two major attempts to reverse these trends—the confederate and Jacobite wars—proved disastrous for those who supported the legitimate monarchy. The catholic church was for much of the period on the defensive, and at the end of the century was subjected to severe legal restraints. The Irish economy was seriously affected by two wars, and the resilience that it showed in the intervals was limited by the requirements of English commercial policy.
The Maynooth question of 1845
Authors: Norman E.R.
Published: August 2016

The protestants behave shockingly, and display a narrow-mindedness and want of sense on the subject of religion which is quite a disgrace to the nation.

Queen Victoria, in 1845

The Maynooth question, which occupied so much public attention in 1845—which Harriet Martineau remarked was ‘the great political controversy of the year, the subject on which society seemed to be going mad’—in fact comprised several issues of unequal significance. As a political question, it lurched the conservative party to the point of grave division; it was a dress-rehearsal for the corn law split in the following year. It was also an incident in the Irish policy of the great Peel ministry, a part of the general reconstitution of higher education in Ireland, and an attempt, together with the charitable bequests act and the creation of the Queen’s Colleges, to conciliate moderate catholic opinion and syphon off some quantity of O’Connell’s abundant support.
The Thomas Davis Lectures, 1953–67
Authors: Martin F.X.
Published: August 2016

After 1920, when radio became established in the United States and Europe, pessimists declared that there would be a consequent and inevitable decline in independent thinking, literature and scholarship. Undoubtedly in the beginning listeners were hypnotized by the new invention and were inclined to be passive, just as viewers of television were prone to be ‘captive’ thirty years later. But once the public had adjusted itself to the novelty of radio, it began to demand quality and to insist not merely on first-class entertainment but also on serious programmes. This demand showed its effects first in the realm of music, and in due time in that of scholarship. At the very least it may be said that radio has drawn on and benefited from academic learning. It can be argued that it has also stimulated scholarship, and this has certainly proved to be the case with the Thomas Davis Lectures, which have been transmitted regularly from Radio Éireann since 1953.
A new history of Ireland
Authors: Moody T.W.
Published: August 2016

The completion in 1967 of thirty years of Irish Historical Studies has been the occasion for a stocktaking (still in progress) of the achievement of those years in Irish historiography. They are coming to be seen as an era of remarkable advances in specialist research, in professional technique, in historical organisation, and in the publication of special studies, source materials, bibliographies and aids to research. Though this research has been unevenly spread, it has produced an impressive body of new knowledge on many periods and topics. The conditions for scholarly work on Irish history have thus been transformed; and there is a world of difference between the prospects for Irish historiography in 1938 and now.
Ireland and Anglo-papal relations, 1880-85
Authors: Woods C.J.
Published: August 2016

The search for a solution to the Irish question in the 19th century led to several attempts to obtain the support of the papacy for the policies of the English government. Though England and the papacy never maintained formal diplomatic relations, mattels of common interest were dealt with by a succession of agents resident in Rome. Around 1850 began the practice of getting an envoy formally accredited to Tuscany to reside in Rome and to treat with the Vatican. The most famous of these was Odo Russell (later Lord Ampthill) whose stay in Rome lasted from 1858 to 1870. After the disappearance of Tuscany as a separate state in 1860 his accreditation was to Naples. In 1861, on the fall of Naples, he ceased formally to be accredited. The pope would not, of course, treat with any envoy accredited to the new kingdom of Italy. Russell kept the government’s view of Irish problems before the pope and may have been partly responsible for Pio Nono’s condemnation of Fenianism in January 1870. Russell’s successor, Sir Henry Jervoise, remained only until 1874 when he was withdrawn by Lord Derby and not replaced.
Mortality in Magherafelt, County Derry, in the early eighteenth century
Authors: Morgan Valerie
Published: August 2016

Several writers on Irish population in the pre-famine period have suggested that detailed local studies are urgently needed to supplement the evidence from national data, such as the early census returns or the hearth tax lists, and to assist in clarifying elusive problems such as age of marriage, size of family, death-rate changes etc. It is often asserted, however, that the amount of detailed information relating to specific areas is limited and of poor quality; in particular, contrasts are drawn between the availability and usefulness of parish registers relating to pre-famine Ireland and those available to scholars in England, France and Scandinavia. Pre-famine parochial registers of burials, marriages and baptisms do nonetheless exist, and, although their use poses problems, there are indications that a good deal of useful information may be waiting to be uncovered.
The last bill of pains and penalties: the case of Daniel O’Sullivan, 1869
Authors: MacDonagh Oliver
Published: August 2016

Acts of pains and penalties are an antique form of criminal action, related (but as a small brother, so to speak) to acts of attainder. Both consisted of bills directed against an individual, and passed by king, lords and commons, in contradistinction to impeachment, where the commons acted as accusers and the lords as sole judges in the case. Whereas, however, attainder was confined to cases of treason and felony and carried the death penalty, pains and penalties also covered conduct tending to grave public mischief and were attended by lesser punishments. The first acts of pains and penalties noticed in the legal textbooks belong to the thirteenth century, and generally concern fugitives domiciled abroad, the last belong to the 1720s and 1730s and cover a wide range of political or quasi-political offences. The Layers conspiracy, the South Sea Bubble scandal and the Porteous riots all ended in this form of punitive legislation.
Massachusetts labour and the League of Nations controversy in 1919
Authors: Jeffreys-Jones Rhodri
Published: August 2016

Why did a minority succeed in defeating the League of Nations? The failure of the United States senate to ratify President Woodrow Wilson’s peace treaty has invited explanation for half a century and more. Historians argue that the intraisigence of Wilson and of his outright opponents, the ‘Irreconcilables’, forced a sufficient number of senators to drop their support. They attribute significance to the sensitivities of Republicans and congressmen smarting under the wartime powers of a Democratic president. They have also, rather reluctantly, turned their attention to the senators’ constituents. In dealing with the latter, historians have emphasised the influence of Irish-Americans. The Irish contingent, Link argues, ‘were up in arms because Wilson had refused to press the cause of Irish independence in Paris and because the treaty allegedly benefited the hated English’. According to Adler, even those who considered that ‘American-Irishmen were asses’ conceded their influence: ‘each jackass had one vote and there were lots of them’. Stone agrees that the ‘Irish vote, always important in American politics, had added significance for the league fight’.
XXXIII Dunmanway, County Cork, 1746–9
Authors: Lockhart Douglas G.
Published: August 2016

Irish newspapers are a valuable source of information for studies of the development of textile industries and their impact on the growth of towns and villages during the first half of the eighteenth century. A search has revealed two advertisements relating to the village of Dunmanway, situated in an isolated location near the source of the River Bandon in County Cork, which in the mid-eighteenth century was an important centre of textile manufacturing. Contemporary descriptions of Dunmanway include the reports of inspectors to the Linen Board, correspondence between Sir Richard Cox, the village landowner, and Thomas Prior, a founder member of the Dublin Society and an essay by Prior which described the characteristics of the Irish linen industry.
Tudor policy and the Kildare ascendancy in the lordship of Ireland, 1496-1534
Authors: Ellis Steven G.
Published: August 2016

The dominance of successive earls of Kildare in Anglo-Irish politics between 1470 and 1534 has prompted historians to label the period that of ‘the Kildare ascendancy’. This term denotes more than just the years in which the earls were in office; it includes assumptions about government policy, and the king’s relations with his Anglo-Irish magnates. From the later fourteenth century, the crown had normally maintained a deputy in Ireland directly from its English resources; and from his salary the deputy agreed to provide a retinue for the defence of the lordship. The scale of subvention and size of the retinue declined progressively, however, and the Irish revenues were too small to support a deputy lacking a substantial landed interest there: the king therefore sacrificed a degree of political control for financial economy and after 1478 relied almost exclusively on the local power of Kildare.
Implementing the 1921 treaty: Lionel Curtis and constitutional procedure
Authors: McColgan John
Published: August 2016

If there is a top civil service adviser to the British government on imperial affairs in the early twentieth century whose influence was such that his biography is long overdue, it is Lionel Curtis. And in the context of recent Irish history, if there is a person whose role in shaping the British conception of the 1921 Anglo-Irish settlement has yet to be fully appreciated or analysed, it is again Lionel Curtis. Lord Longford’s references to Curtis in Peace by ordeal give some indication of the influence his ideas had on British cabinet ministers before and during the treaty negotiations in the summer and autumn of 1921. But a much fuller and more systematic survey of Curtis’s association with Ireland over a broader period is needed to measure this extraordinary man’s imprint on Anglo-Irish relations.
Celts, Carthaginians and constitutions: Anglo-Irish literary relations, 1780 - 1820
Authors: Vance Norman
Published: August 2016

F. S. L. Lyons in his Ford lectures at Oxford, and in a broadcast talk, has stressed the need for a new general theory of Irish culture, a wider understanding of the Irish tradition. This essay is an attempt to take a few steps in this direction. It will review some of the English literature written in Ireland between 1780 and 1820, and trace its connections with Ireland and with England. In the forty years after the Volunteer movement, it will be argued, Irish authors writing in English, influenced by new ideas about Celts and constitutions and even about Carthaginians, did something to establish a tradition of specifically Irish literature. This has all too often been neglected or misunderstood by literary historians, for whom Anglo-Irish literature begins more than half a century later.
Defence and the role of Erskine Childers in the treaty negotiations of 1921
Authors: Hawkings F.M.A.
Published: August 2016

Erskine Childers has commonly been seen as the éminence grise of hardline republicanism in the negotiations for an Anglo-Irish treaty that took place in London between October and December 1921. Lloyd George described him as ‘rigid and fanatical’ and believed that Childers had attempted to ‘wreck every endeavour to reach agreement’ Thomas Jones saw Childers as an ‘intense republican’, and it is clear that Jones, too, regarded Childers as an obstacle to an agreed solution. Childers has been portrayed as an inflexible wrangler who stood in the way of an agreement in the winter of 1921 and who was fundamentally opposed to the more conciliatory views of Arthur Griffith, in particular, and of Michael Collins. In Peace by ordeal Lord Longford has stressed the gulf that lay between Childers and Griffith and the way in which this contributed to a division in the Irish dele-g ation as a whole. On one side were the delegates who were more prepared to compromise and reach a settlement with the British negotiators; on the other were those, backed by Childers, who held out against concessions and who signed the treaty on 6 December only with the greatest reluctance.
The exclusion of catholics from the legal profession in Ireland, 1537-1829
Authors: Kenny Colum
Published: August 2016

Between the Reformation and catholic emancipation a succession of statutory and other provisions was framed by the authorities in Dublin and London with the intention of enforcing religious conformity Persons who refused to conform were rendered liable to various disabilities and penalties of a severe nature. Discrimination became widespread in the first half of the eighteenth century with what were collectively known as the penal laws. These contained general provisions which touched all citizens in relation to many aspects of their lives, especially the holding of land. But from 1537 there were also specific measures aimed at particular groups, including the legal profession. These measures ensured that appointments to the bench could continue to be manipulated on the basis of loyalty to the established church. Long after the first relaxation of the penal laws, catholic lawyers who refused to conform were still excluded from the higher ranks of the legal profession. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which statutory and other requirements, introduced from 1537 onwards, were effective in excluding Roman Catholics from legal practice and in achieving outward religious conformity among lawyers between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
John Mandeville and the Irish crimes act of 1887
Authors: Geary Laurence M.
Published: August 2016

Imprisonment is a reality of discipline most useful to the modern soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-indulgence. Like a sickness or a spiritual retreat it purifies and ennobles; and the soul emerges from it stronger and more self-contained. Alas, that these influences should so soon lose their power! And yet, fall as we may from the higher level, they do not wholly perish, but remain for us a wholesonle recollection and a standard of all that we can imagine best for this life and another. (Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, In vinculis (London, 1889), pp vii-viii.)

We have repeatedly called attention to the fact. .that the food and discipline to which prisoners are evidently subjected, under at least the first stage of the penal system, and during short terms of confinement in her majesty’s jails and penitentiaries, are destructive to health and consequently dangerous to life. (Lancet, 21 Jan. 1882.)
Select documents XLII : Peter French’s petition for an Irish mint, 1619
Authors: Gillespie Raymond
Published: August 2016

The interest of the document printed here lies in its description and explanation of one of the paradoxes of the early seventeenth-century Irish economy. The rapid increase in the labour supply and increased commercialisation brought a dramatic growth in exports of all kinds from Ireland. The expansion was such that for the greater part of the period between 1603 and 1641 Ireland appeared to have had a surplus in the balance of trade. Yet, as the author of this document points out, despite this dramatic growth, Ireland remained a poor country, even by the standards of other contemporary underdeveloped regions such as Scotland. The resolution of that paradox is provided here by Peter French, an alderman of Galway and a member of one of the most important Galway merchant families. The document is a petition by French to the English privy council which is preserved among the papers of Sir Julius Caesar, master of the rolls and chancellor of the exchequer under James I. It was acquired by the British Library in 1842. French’s explanation of the paradox of poverty at a time of rapid trade growth is one historians have not fully considered. It depends on looking at the flow of specie and bullion in and out of early seventeenth-century Ireland, a difficult exercise given the nature of the surviving sources.
A new history of Ireland
Authors: Elliott Marianne
Published: August 2016

The travail of the mountains has finally ended with the publication of the long-awaited second volume ofA new history of Ireland, almost two decades after its inception. By a curious coincidence Clarendon has simultaneously published the second volume of theHistory of Wales(R.R. Davies,Conquest, coexistence and change: Wales, 1063-1415). A comparison is therefore not only inevitable, it is revealing. The Welsh volume is carefully integrated and closely written, whereas its Irish counterpart lumbers along camel-like with sometimes distressingly little co-ordination: where Davies contains his narrative within a tight conceptual framework, the latter is constructed on a traditional narrative scheme that consumes half of the text. The difference is due in part to the probably insurmountable difficulty of integrating the labours of nineteen contributors, but part of the problem arises from the rigidity of the scheme into which their labours are compressed.
The devaluation of 1460 and the origins of the Irish pound
Authors: McDowell J Moore
Published: August 2016

The Irish parliament which met at Drogheda in 1460 is best known for its legislative declaration of its own sovereignty Although this was subsequently abrogated by Poynings’ law, the 1460 parliament effected one lasting change, to which little attention has been given: it established a separate Irish currency for the first time and in so doing created an institution which with varying visibility and value was to last until 1826 — the Irish pound.

Before 1460 an Irish coinage existed. This was, however, merely a local minting to a common bullion standard which applied in England and Ireland since the first Irish minting under King John at the very beginning of the thirteenth century. Considerable historical attention of a numismatic bent has been paid to the coinages issued under the Normans. It has been concentrated in the main on the more or less mechanical questions of where, how many and by whom coins were issued. Wider analysis has been almost entirely political or related to the problems of the exchequer — mintings in place and in quantity being indicators of Norman influence and of the cost of such administration as existed in medieval Ireland.
The Irish electorate, 1868–1915
Authors: Walker Brian Mercer
Published: August 2016

Between 1801 and 1921 Ireland in common with the rest of the British Isles was represented in the house of commons at Westminster. During this time the basis of the Irish representation underwent considerable change both in relation to the number of Irish M.P.s, electors and population and in comparison with the number of M.P.s, electors and population for Great Britain. The purpose of this article ir, by means of statistical tables, to analyse the Irish electorate between 1868 and 1915 and in particular to show the effect of the electoral reforms of 1868 and 1884–5. The electorate of Ireland will be viewed not only in the context of the separate Irish constituencies and the proportion of electors to adult males and population in each but also in the context of the whole of the British Isles and the total number of electors and population with the proportion of electors to population in each country. As well the average number of electors and population per M.P. for the different countries will be shown.
The 1941 mission of Frank Aiken to the United States: an American perspective
Authors: Rosenberg Joseph L.
Published: August 2016

Éire was economically and militarily impotent, strategically significant, and the only European neutral behind allied lines in World War II. Although the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, refused to co-operate openly with his protectors in Britain and his friends in America or even to distinguish publicly between them and Nazi Germany, he wanted Anglo-American aid, and he wanted it without conditions. He wanted what the American minister at Dublin, David Gray, called a ‘free ride’

On St Patrick’s Day, 1941, de Valera announced that he would send a special agent to purchase American food and weapons and expressed the hope that Ireland’s friends would help the mission. Acknowledging that the war was causing shortages, he repeated earlier claims that the belligerents, blockading each other, were blockading Éire, a land determined to avoid involvement in any ‘imperial adventure’
Sir Robert Peel’s ‘Select Irish library’
Authors: Palmer Norman D.
Published: August 2016

While in Ireland as chief secretary (1812–18) Sir Robert Peel became acquainted with William Shaw Mason, the Irish topographer and statistician who was remembrancer or receiver of the first-fruits or twentieth parts in Ireland and secretary to the commissioners for public records. Impressed with Mason's work and abilities, Peel encouraged him to prepare a major statistical survey of Ireland, along the lines of Sir John Sinclair's famous survey of Scotland; and the result was the three-volume work entitled A statistical account, or parochial survey of Ireland, drawn up from the communications of the clergy (the three volumes were published in 1814, 1816, and 1819 respectively), which is still a valuable record of the period. In 1819 Mason compiled a Survep, valuation, and census of the barony of Portnehinch in Queen's County. Published in 1821, this work was submitted to George IV during the royal visit to Ireland in that year ‘as a model for a statistical survey of the whole country’.
The origins of the Ulster unionist party, 1885–6
Authors: Savage D.C.
Published: August 2016

The years 1885–6 were years of political confusion in Great Britain and Ireland. No less than four governments were in office from the spring of 1885 to the summer of 1886. Gladstone's government, beset by ministerial quarrels, fell on 9 June 1885, and was succeeded by the caretaker government of Lord Salisbury. The general election of December prolonged this political instability. The liberals were returned but with a majority of only two over the other parties. Salisbury remained in power until 27 January 1886 when he was defeated in the house. Gladstone, already a convert to some form of home rule for Ireland, formed a cabinet and drew up two bills, the Government of Ireland Bill and the Land Purchase (Ireland) Bill. The former was introduced on 8 April and exactly two months later was defeated owing to the desertion of ninety-three liberal members. In the subsequent general election the conservatives and liberal unionists routed the Gladstonian forces.
XVIII The History Of Poynings’ Law, 1615–41
Authors: Clarke Aidan
Published: August 2016

Thirty years ago, in a magisterial study of the early operation of Poynings’ Law, Professor R. Dudley Edwards and Professor T.W. Moody noted that ‘the primary dividing-line in the history of the law falls between the parliaments of 1613–15 and 1634–5’. Previously, they showed, it had curtailed the Irish executive and enjoyed the approval of the Irish parliament; only subsequently, they argued, was it used as a means of enabling the government to control parliament. The purpose of the present study is to develop that argument by examining both the way in which Lord Deputy Wentworth took advantage of altered circumstances to reierse the statute’s function in 1634–5 and the way in which members of the Irish parliament unsuccessfully campaigned to restore the traditional interpretation of its provisions in 1640–41.
Historical Criticism of the Song of Dermot and the Earl
Authors: O'Doherty J. F.
Published: August 2016

‘The Song of Dermot and the Earl ’ is the title invented Mr. Goddard Orpen for the old Anglo-French poem which he edited, in 1892, from the sole manuscript in which it survives, among the Carew papers in the archiepiscopal library Lambeth Palace. As the Song is regarded generally as an important source for the history of the Anglo-Norman invasion Ireland, and as I have reached conclusions on that point serious different from those of the editor, I wish to submit my conclusions for examination.
Historical Revision
Authors: O'Doherty J. F.
Published: August 2016

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.
The Irish in New York in the early eighteen-sixties
Authors: Man Albon P
Published: August 2016

July 1863 was the turning point of the American civil Avar. Prospects of ultimate victory for the north improved greatly that month, when General Lee's thrust into Pennsylvania was repulsed at the battle of Gettysburg, and Vicksburg, last confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, fell after a long siege. Yet during the sultry week of 12 July 1863 the most violent race riots of American history took place in the streets of New York, touched off by enforcement of a conscription act which congress had passed four months earlier How many negroes were lynched by white rioters and their bodies borne away on the waters surrounding Manhattan Island can never be known. But between twelve and fifteen hundred white persons died in this civil war within a civil war, most of them slain by police and soldiers charged with quelling the upheaval.

If newspaper accounts, official reports, and other sources of information agree upon any point about the draft disorders, it is that almost all the participants were Irish. ‘The immediate actors in the late riots in this city, got up to resist the draft and to create a diversion in favor of the southern rebellion, were almost exclusively Irishmen and catholics’ , wrote Orestes A. Brownson, America's leading convert to the Catholic Church.
Sir Thomas Phillips of Limavady Servito
Authors: Moody T. W.
Published: August 2016

Sir Thomas Phillips is not to be found among the worthies of the Dictionary of National Biography, nor is he mentioned in Webb's Compendium of Irish Biography or Crone's Concise Dictionary. He was one of those known in early-seventeenth Ireland as ‘ servitors ’—military men who had fought for the crown during Tyrone's rebellion and established claims on the royal generosity which they expected to have satisfied after the peace. In the Ulster plantation, servitors constituted a separate group among the planters, and some of them thus became the founders of great landed families. In his successful pursuit of forfeited land in Ulster, Phillips is a fair example of the servitor class. Very likely he would have left no more mark on Irish history than many another fellow-adventurer, had he not staked his claim in a part of Ulster that presently became a sphere of interest of the city of London. Within a few years of the Londoner's advent, Phillips engaged them in a controversy which he maintained with almost incredible pertinacity for a quarter of a century, and which, on the eve of his death, ended in a crushing defeat for his opponents.
English Institutions in Medieval Ireland
Authors: Richardson H. G.
Published: August 2016

A new edition of Professor Curti's History of Medieval Ireland is very welcome. Though essentially the same book, much has been rewritten : there are additions to the text as it appeared in 1923, and a good deal of detail and some footnotes have been omitted, for which the first edition must be consulted. Other changes are the division of the chapters into headed sections, the inclusion of genealogical tables, and appendices on the Ostmen, the towns and the legal treatment of the Irish.

The merits of Dr.Curti's work are very great, and chiefly his determination to write the history of the whole of Ireland, to rest every statement upon evidence, and to give exact references.
Giraldiana
Authors: Richter Michael
Published: August 2016

History has an attraction for the amateur as well as for the professional, and though the attraction may be of a similar kind, the amateur is rarely given access to primary sources. Yet it is from these that history is written and fundamentally experienced. Giraldus Gambrensis (1146-1223) wrote about Ireland and his native Wales in the late twelfth century in such a fashion that his works can be read with pleasure, profit and, if correctly presented, understanding by both amateur and professional. Most of his works have been available to professional historians for a century in the edition published in the Rolls Series; the rest of his works have been edited since then. Yet surprisingly, rather little use was made of them until very recently. Only over the past decade has the work of this colourful and controversial individual attracted more than passing attention.
National festivals, the state and ‘protestant ascendancy’ in Ireland, 1790–1829
Authors: Hill Jacqueline R.
Published: August 2016

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.
Unionist rhetoric and Irish local government reform, 1895–9
Authors: Gailey Andrew
Published: August 2016

Gerald Balfour's appointment as chief secretary for Ireland on 4 July 1895 was as unexpected as it was intriguing. Recording the event in his diary Sir Edward Hamilton, Gladstone's former private secretary and now assistant financial secretary to the Treasury, described it as ‘quite a surprise and a considerable experiment’, and the Carlton Club, noted more for its relentless suspicion of Irish chief secretaries than its welcoming of surprises and experiments, grumbled ominously. After all Gerald Balfour had led an uneventful academic life at Cambridge followed by a back-bench career in the house of commons that had proved neither prominent nor promising, and he clearly owed his new position to the support of his illustrious brother, Arthur, and the unbridled nepotism of his uncle, Lord Salisbury, the prime minister. Like his avuncular patron, he soon developed a weakness for ‘blazing indiscretion’ and in his first major policy speech to his Leeds constituents after his election he spoke of ‘killing home rule with kindness’ This rather glib phrase provoked a furore among the Irish nationalists and aroused the scepticism of many Irish unionists, though, as Gerald Balfour subsequently protested, he was merely echoing the strategy his brother had pursued with full unionist support in the 1880s.
The Irish admiralty: its organisation and development, c. 1570-1640
Authors: Appleby John C. , O'Dowd Mary
Published: August 2016

There were two main concerns of Tudor and Stuart governments in relation to the sea surrounding the coast of Ireland. First, and most important, there was the need to defend it from hostile ships belonging to England's enemies. This involved the security of England as much as Ireland and, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was usually controlled by the admiralty establishment in London. The setting out and supervision of ships to defend the Irish and English coasts was rarely delegated to an Irish authority. The second concern was the administration of the law maritime in Ireland. The law maritime included within its jurisdiction all crimes committed at sea or on the coast such as the seizure and robbing of ships by pirates and other sea-rovers, as well as cases involving death aboard ship, seamen's wages, salvage, wreck, damage by collision at sea, and other disputes involving the sea or the men who earned their living from it. In the medieval period such matters were often dealt with in the courts of chancery and exchequer, but in the later middle ages a separate admiralty court emerged in England where the civil maritime law was practised. The existence of the court, however, remained shadowy until it was enlarged and established on a permanent basis in the 1530s. At the same time, procedure in the court was simplified by the passing of an act which allowed for the prosecution of crimes at sea by special commissions according to common law.
Canada, Ireland and the Commonwealth: the declaration of the Irish republic, 1948-9
Authors: McEvoy F J
Published: August 2016

The relationship of Ireland to the Commonwealth during the period of its membership was a tortuous one. Forced to accept dominion status under threat of the renewal of Anglo-Irish hostilities, Ireland was not an enthusiastic member of the club as were the older dominions. The Constitutional Amendment (No. 27) Bill, enacted on 11 December 1936, removed all references to the crown and governor general from the constitution while the Executive Authority (External Relations) Bill, enacted the next day, recognised the crown only for purposes of diplomatic representation and international agreements. These two measures, commonly referred to as the External Relations Act, left Ireland a more or less undeclared republic with ambiguous links to the Commonwealth. Wartime neutrality differentiated Ireland even further from the other dominions, aroused British anger and brought the question of Ireland's constitutional status into even greater prominence. Ireland was, the Canadian high commissioner in Dublin considered in 1944, a more or less unknown quantity' The Canadian government, though it would have preferred a different choice, respected Ireland's neutrality and resented British actions, taken without prior consultation, that might have contrived to drive Ireland from the Commonwealth. The end of the war removed a major cause of grievance but left Ireland's nosition unresolved.