bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Gaelic law and the Tudor conquest of Ireland: the social background of the sixteenth-century recensions of the pseudo-historical Prologue to the Senchas már
Authors: Patterson Nerys
Published: August 2016

Contemporary studies of the Tudor conquest of Ireland identify numerous interest-groups whose different political strategies produced a complex course of events. This paper examines the reactions of an influential segment of the Gaelic learned class, the traditional lawyers (brehons), to the threat of conquest. It offers evidence that some important brehon families supported administrative reforms within the Gaelic lordships, in accord with crown demands, and that they used native jural traditions to support legal change.

As participants in the struggles of this period, the brehons have been viewed by scholars as part of the traditional cultural élite, which included poets and historians. Their indistinct appearance in the historical record partly accounts for such treatment. Brehons are scarcely mentioned in the Irish annals, while English sources tend to depict them as ultramontanists, practising ‘secret and hidden rites’, not as administrators with policies. Unlike the bardic poets, the brehons failed to leave behind a body of work that reflected their personal opinions; their literary monument, the corpus of Irish law-tracts, presents formidable barriers to interpretation, even as jural material, let alone as testimony to social history. These difficulties arise from the brehons’ deliberate attempts to preserve an appearance of antiquity and changelessness in the jural tradition. So successful were they in this, that many scholars believe that the later brehon schools copied the old law-tracts solely for their antiquarian interest and that the tracts had little relevance to contemporary affairs.
The record of the first Dáil debates
Authors: O’Brien Gerard
Published: August 2016

With the Act of Union and the consequent disappearance of the College Green legislature, the Irish parliamentary tradition was subsumed into the broader Westminster framework. When the tradition re-emerged in an Irish context, it appeared as a curious combined product of the Westminster experience and of events which had little to do with any kind of parliament. In regard to its early political existence and experience, Dáil Éireann’s most obvious historical forerunner was the Jacobite parliament of 1689, which had its being in a state of open warfare with a rival political establishment and whose legitimacy and legality were largely of its own making. The critical difference between the two, from the historical viewpoint, was, of course, the apparent victory of the Dáil’s military supporters in December 1921. With victory came ultimate legitimacy, legality and some public credibility. From a purely administrative angle, this was also the moment when Dáil documents ceased to be merely propaganda material or, in more sensitive instances, evidence sought by Castle intelligence agents. Henceforth they would be important sources of the new state’s constitutional authority, and precedents for future legal and administrative practices.
The Church of Ireland: a critical bibliography, 1536–1992 Part II: 1603–41
Authors: Ford Alan
Published: August 2016

There is a marked difference between the history of the Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century. The historian of the early Reformation in Ireland has to deal with shifting religious divides and, in the Church of Ireland, with a complex and ambiguous religious entity, established but not necessarily Protestant, culturally unsure, politically weak, and theologically unselfconscious. By contrast, the first part of the seventeenth century is marked by the creation of a distinct Protestant church, clearly distinguished in structural, racial, theological and political terms from its Roman Catholic counterpart. The history of the Church of Ireland in the first four decades of the seventeenth century is therefore primarily about the creation of this church and the way in which its new structures and exclusive identity were shaped.
The Church of Ireland: a critical bibliography, 1536–1992 Part IV: 1690–1800
Authors: Connolly S.J.
Published: August 2016

The history of this period, as currently studied, falls neatly into three phases. The twenty-five years or so after the fall of James II are marked by limited and largely unsuccessful attempts at reform, undertaken against a background of fundamental divisions on matters of religious and political principle. Thereafter the emphasis shifts to consensus, privilege and self-interest, as we turn to the workings of a comfortable ecclesiastical establishment firmly embedded in the patronage networks of the Hanoverian one-party state. In the last years of the eighteenth century this image of complacent stagnation is qualified by the first signs of spiritual revitalisation. Recent work has modified this chronological framework. Whether it will have to be more radically revised remains to be seen.
Ireland and the English crown, 1171–1541
Authors: Lydon James
Published: August 2016

When the earl of Pembroke met Henry II at Newnham in Gloucestershire in 1171, in the words of Gerald of Wales he surrendered Dublin (significantly called regni caput), the adjacent cantreds, the maritime towns and castles to the king. ‘As for the rest of the land he had conquered, he and his heirs were to acknowledge that it was held of the king and his heirs.’ Already Mac Murchada had given King Henry ‘the bond of submission and oath of fealty’. Later Mac Carthaig did homage as well as fealty, gave hostages and an annual tribute and ‘voluntarily submitted to the authority of the king of England’, while other Irish submitted and swore fealty. Most significantly, according to Gerald, Ó Conchobair of Connacht Obtained the king’s peace, became dependent for the tenure of his kingdom on the king as overlord, and bound himself in alliance with the king by the strongest ties of fealty and submission’. All in Ireland became the king’s subjects, and Henry’s lordship was accepted by all. It was later confirmed by the pope and publicly proclaimed by his legate, Cardinal Vivian, at a synod in Dublin. From 1171, then, until 1541, when an Irish parliament declared Henry VIII to be king of Ireland, Anglo-Irish relations were governed by one simple fact: the king of England was ipso facto lord of Ireland. Throughout that period the royal style never changed. In all charters and formal letters issuing from his chancery he was Rex Anglie, Dominus Hibernie etc.

It was Gerald of Wales too who first voiced the new reality which faced Ireland after 1171. When he composed a dedication to King John of a new edition of his Expugnatio Hibernica, sometime around 1209, he reminded him that he should not neglect Ireland and wrote that ‘the Irish kingdom was made subject to the English crown, as if through a perpetual indenture and an indissoluble chain’.
Parnell and the I.R.B. oath
Authors: Maume Patrick
Published: August 2016

The clandestine contacts between Parnell and the Irish Republican Brotherhood as he rose to national leadership in the first years of the land war provoked political controversy in his lifetime and have aroused speculation ever since. Michael Davitt and John Denvir both tried to recruit Parnell into the I.R.B. in 1878 and were told that he was determined never to join a secret society; but some years ago Paul Bew drew attention to a different allegation contained in an anonymous article published in 1930 in An Phoblacht. The writer claimed that as a youth he was one of the Land League organisers imprisoned in Kilmainham jail under Forster’s administration, and recollected a few incidents ‘for the benefit of the younger generation who stand face to face with the same authorities—under a new disguise today’. He described, among other things, the drafting of the ‘no-rent manifesto’ by William O’Brien and I.R.B. recruitment among the prisoners. The article then stated that soon after Parnell’s release from Kilmainham in 1882 he met a Land League organiser from the west while on his way to consult the records of Griffith’s valuation in Trinity College library, that they walked to the library together discussing constitutionalism and physical force, and that in the library Parnell at his own request took the I.R.B. oath, having first pledged the organiser to secrecy for as long as Parnell lived. (The article then casually continues for several paragraphs of reminiscence and reflection.)
The idea of the three orders of society and social stratification in early medieval Ireland
Authors: Powell Timothy E.
Published: August 2016

The law tracts of early medieval Ireland are one of the most remarkable bodies of literature surviving from the middle ages. These tracts, written in Old Irish, date from the late seventh and eighth centuries and thus may be held to reflect something of Irish society not so very long after the introduction of Christianity. Their physical size and linguistic complexity alone have proved daunting, but once these difficulties have been surmounted the scholar is given a picture of society, albeit somewhat fragmentary in places, that suggests an astonishing degree of legal sophistication. One area in which this sophistication is most apparent is in the layers of grades of men for which the law tracts provide. If we are to believe the tracts, Ireland was an elaborately graded society. Even if we do not believe them, it is clear that those interested in law were also interested in the creation of systems of gradation around which to construct their legislation. Not surprisingly, given the importance of the subject, attempts have been made to make sense of social stratification in Ireland using the evidence provided by the law tracts. One of the more recent is by Neil McLeod. In a paper published inZeitschrift für celtische Philologiein 1986–7 McLeod analysed the various ways in which the early Irish law tracts seem to depict social ranking. There has been been much dispute both over how accurately the law tracts portray social stratification in Ireland and how accurate a picture was intended, and McLeod takes issue with the line advanced by Binchy in his 1943 Rhŷs Lecture that the numerous grades found in the laws were of little or no practical significance and, implicit in his argument, were not really intended to be.
Liberals, the Irish Famine and the role of the state
Authors: Bernstein George L.
Published: August 2016

The Irish mythology of the Great Famine of the 1840s explained the failure of the British government to prevent the deaths of some one million people in terms of a Whig government and ruling élite driven by a commitment to laissez-faire ideology which left them indifferent to the loss of Irish lives. At its most extreme, this mythology attributed a wilful genocide to the English. The term myth as used here does not necessarily imply that the account is untrue. Rather, the myth comprises a combination of fact, fiction and the unknowable in a narrative of such power that, for the people who accept it, the myth provides a guide to future understanding and action. In this respect, Irish mythology about the English and the Famine is rooted in facts: the resistance of the Whig government to any interference with the market; the staunch commitment to ideology of central figures in the making of famine policy such as Charles Trevelyan (assistant secretary to the treasury) and Sir Charles Wood (chancellor of the exchequer) and shapers of liberal opinion such as the political economists Nassau Senior and James Wilson (editor of The Economist); and the indifference to Irish suffering, and indeed the hostility to the Irish, as demonstrated in the language of the radical M.P.J.A. Roebuck.
Internecine warfare and the decline of the house of Desmond c. 1510 – c. 1541
Authors: McCormack Anthony M.
Published: August 2016

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond were among the élite of Hiberno-Norman society in Ireland. Equalled in status among the nobility of Ireland only by the earls of Kildare and of Ormond, the Desmonds possessed great power, wealth and influence. Their huge earldom, which covered much of Munster, rendered them the virtual masters of the province and of all the Gaelic Irish and Hiberno-Norman lords therein.

Yet by 1584 they were gone, the earl of Desmond killed while in rebellion, the earldom broken up as an entity, the estates and castles in ruins. Apart from a short-lived return at the end of the century, the house of Desmond was defunct.

The dramatic fall of the house of Desmond has intrigued many historians, who seek its cause in the period leading up to the 1580s and in the political context of the time. They cite the breakdown of the earl’s control, the indebtedness of the earldom, the alleged madness and incapacity for rule of Gerald, the fifteenth earl. They refer to the extension of crown control in Elizabethan Ireland, the English fear of foreign intervention in Ireland, and the campaign for conformity to the new Protestant religion.
XVIII. Bishop Moriarty on disestablishment and the union, 1868
Authors: Whyte J.H. , Moriarty D.
Published: August 2016

The following letter is to be found among the Gladstone papers in the British Museum. Its recipient, William Monsell, M.P. for county Limerick and one of the most prominent Irish liberals, evidently felt it was of sufficient interest to send on to the leader of his party. At the time it was written, Gladstone had already declared himself in favour of disestablishment, though as he was still in opposition he was not yet in a position to give effect to his sympathies.

It comes as no surprise to find Dr Moriarty holding the opinions that he proclaims in this letter. The bishop of Kerry was well known as a staunch advocate of the British connexion. He had been the fiercest of all the bishops in his denunciations of fenianism; and a few years later he was publicly to condemn the home rule movement. But in none of his published utterances, probably, did he state so frankly the reasons for his point of view. In a public manifesto addressed to a people critical of his ideas, he would have concentrated on those arguments which might have some appeal for them. In a private letter such as this one, addressed to a person in full sympathy with him, he was hindered by no diplomatic considerations from giving a frank account of his opinions.
The medieval county of Kildare
Authors: Otway-Ruthven J.
Published: August 2016

The general outlines of the Norman settlement of Leinster were laid downin the time of Strongbow. At the time of the Norman invasion that part of Leinster which was to become Kildare was divided into four main tribal territories, described as cantreds under the Normans: Offelan in the north; Offaly to the north-west and centre; Omurethy in the south; and Leix to the south-west.

Offelan is now represented by the baronies of North and South Salt, Ikeathy and Oughterany, and Clane (formerly Otymy), which were granted to Adam de Hereford, who shared his grant with his brothers John and Richard; and North and South Naas, which were granted to Maurice Fitz Gerald, whose son, William, also divided his grant with his brother Gerald, the ancestor of the earls of Kildare.
The Irish conservatives and home rule, 1869-73
Authors: Thornley David
Published: August 2016

In May 1870 a number of gentlemen met in a Dublin hotel to consider the possibility of reviving the demand for a separate Irish legislature. Out ofthis meeting grew the Home Government Association, and ultimately the Home Rule League of Isaac Butt. A number of political developments had made it possible to revive an agitation which had lain dormant for twenty years; to one of these in particular has been ascribed much of the responsibility forthe founding of the new movement. ‘It may be doubted that there everwas a time since 1800 when Irish protestants as a body belieyed that Irish affairs could be better understood and cared for in a London legislature than in an Irish parliament’, wrote A. M. Sullivan in 1877; concern for their rights, privileges, and possessions as a minority in the midst of adangerous catholic majority, was the real reason why they supported the union system’. It was the contention of Sullivan and other writers on the period that the disestablishment of their church and the invasion of their position on the land by the reforming measures of the liberal administration of 1868 destroyed the compact of mutual self-interest between Irish protestantism and the British legislature, and that the movement which Butt founded in 1870 owed much of its strength to a recrudescence of Irish protestant nationalism. It is the purpose of this paper to subject this contention to a somewhat closer examination than it has hitherto undergone.
The ‘army mutiny’ of 1924 and the assertion of civilian authority in independent Ireland
Authors: Valiulis Maryann Gialanella
Published: August 2016

The early years of Irish independence were years of precedent-setting decisions that shaped and moulded the new state. In a country just emerging from a struggle for independence and a devastating civil war, the army was one of the most vital and central institutions; and the relationship between the military and the elected civilian government was crucial. In fact, at the end of the civil war, a strong possibility existed that, unless the government acted quickly to establish its control, the army could remain the dominant force in Irish politics for years to come. The response to the Irish army mutiny of 1924, however, upheld and affirmed the supremacy of constitutional rule in Ireland.
Emergency legislation and agrarian disorder in Ireland, 1821–41
Authors: Crossman Virginia
Published: August 2016

The repeated use of special legislation to suppress popular disorder in Ireland and the failure to provide any permanent remedy has been a recurrent theme of Irish history. Introducing the Catholic relief bill in 1829, Robert Peel stressed the ‘melancholy fact’ that ‘for scarcely one year, during the period that has elapsed since the Union, has Ireland been governed by the ordinary course of the law’. Catholic emancipation proved no more of a panacea than the Union before it. Ireland, as J.L. Hammond once observed, was ruled under the ordinary law for only five years of the first half of the nineteenth century. Approaching the subject from a slightly different angle, Samuel Clark tells us that governments passed or renewed thirty-five coercion acts between the Union and the Famine. But although this state of affairs has occasioned much comment from historians it has been subjected to little systematic analysis. There has, for example, been no attempt to emulate for the earlier part of the century Townshend’s examination of British policy in response to political violence after 1848. Such a project cannot be attempted in a single article but it is hoped that a brief survey of repressive legislation in the years from 1821 to 1841, and a more detailed look at that aimed at agrarian disturbances will help to fill this historical lacuna.
The Craig-Collins pacts of 1922: two attempted reforms of the Northern Ireland government
Authors: Hopkinson Michael
Published: August 2016

The six months following the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921 saw an appalling level of violence in Belfast and on the border, which threatened the stability of the newly formed Northern Ireland government. Official figures for the period between 6 December 1921 and 31 May 1922 listed seventy-three protestants and 147 catholics killed in Belfast and eight protestants and twenty-two catholics killed in the six counties outside Belfast. In that period two wide-ranging agreements aimed to reform the northern government and security system: they became known, somewhat inaccurately, as the Craig-Collins pacts, of 21 January and 30 March 1922. This article discusses the motivation behind the pacts and the reasons for their failure in a wide context, by giving equal weight to the attitudes of the British government and to opinion on both sides of the Irish border.

The Northern Ireland government was established in 1920–21. It was unrecognised by the dáil government in the south and by much of the northern catholic minority. The province developed against a background of violence and upheaval, including the expulsion of catholic shipyard workers from their work in the summer of 1920; the dáil retaliated by boycotting Belfast goods. The period also saw increasing I.R.A. activity in the north during the latter stages of the Anglo-Irish war, and the five-month truce that followed it. Though the northern government was not a party to the treaty negotiations, only reluctantly accepting the granting of dominion status to the south, the months before and after the settlement greatly increased tensions in the north-east.
An agenda for women’s history in Ireland, 1500–1900: Part II: 1800–1900
Authors: Luddy Maria
Published: August 2016

What is exciting about looking at women’s history in nineteenth-century Ireland is the great wealth of material which is available for study and research. Yet very little relevant work has been published. The reasons for this neglect are manifold, and include a basic indifference on the part of most academics to the role played by women in Irish history, which has resulted in the general exclusion of women from historical discourse. The lack of courses recognising the history of women has further relegated their study to the periphery. In Ireland historians, and particularly historians of women, have yet to establish a narrative and an explanatory and interpretative framework which includes Irish women. Through the work of historians in other countries, we have various conceptual frameworks within which to operate and many hypotheses to test with regard to the situation of women in Ireland. The areas for research are extensive. Here I intend to look generally at a number of aspects of women’s lives which have been investigated to some degree and to suggest sources which can be used to extend these investigations. I also wish to look at other issues which have received no attention but which would add considerably to our understanding, not only of women, but of the complex realities which made up nineteenth-century Irish society.
Eugenics in Ireland: the Belfast Eugenics Society, 1911–15
Authors: Jones Greta
Published: August 2016

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

We are coming to recognise more and more clearly that racial factors and especially hereditary mental factors, although they work (it cannot be too often repeated) in conjunction with other factors, are among the most influential in determining the course of a nation’s history . . . What historians regard as degeneration, sickness and ageing of a nation, what they look on as the decline of a nation are the outcome of the racial constituents of the people concerned.

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.
Arthur O’Connor
Authors: MacDermot Frank
Published: August 2016

Arthur O’Connor, or more correctly Conner, is now little remembered, but from 1795 to 1798 no leader of the United Irishmen had more prestige and influence than he. In England he was the darling of the Foxite whigs. In France he played a part in procuring the expedition to Bantry Bay. In Ireland he inspired and organised rebellion. He suffered nearly five years imprisonment, narrowly escaped the gallows and spent the last fifty years of his life in exile. There he was made a général de division by Napoleon, was intimate with Lafayette, Volney, and the idéologues, and married the daughter of Condorcet and niece of Grouchy. He lived through the last days of the consulate, and all of the first empire, the restoration, the hundred days, the second restoration, the July monarchy and the second republic to die tranquilly at the dawn of the second empire. An obituary notice in The Nation sang his praises.
Thirty years’ work in Irish history (I)
Authors: Otway-Ruthven J.
Published: August 2016

With this issue of Irish Historical Studies we complete our thirtieth year of publication. Among other ways of marking the occasion, as announced in our last issue, a series of survey-articles has been planned, assessing the contribution of the past thirty years to the historiography of Ireland. Three of these articles appear below. The series is to be completed in five further articles dealing with Ireland before the Norman invasion, sixteenth-century Ireland (1485–1603), nineteenth-century Ireland (1800–1914), Ireland since 1914, and, finally, Irish history generally.
Frewen’s Anglo-American campaign for federalism, 1910–21
Authors: Ward Alan J.
Published: August 2016

In the literature of the Irish independence movement the question of a federal settlement involving the United Kingdom, and possibly the whole empire, in a grand scheme of ‘devolution’ has received relatively little attention. However, the papers of Moreton Frewen (1853–1924), now lodged in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., should add a great deal to any assessment of this aspect of the Irish Problem.

Frewen was a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry with business interests in America. He married a daughter of Leonard Jerome of New York, and was therefore an uncle of both Winston Churchill and Shane Leslie, both of whom had mothers who were Jeromes. Furthermore, his brother’s daughter became the second wife of Sir Edward Carson, and in addition to these family associations he was acquainted with the most prominent men of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic. His life was actually a series of business and political failures, but his papers hold the key to a fascinating chapter in the search for a federal solution to Ireland’s political problems, and most of what follows is based upon those papers.
Sixteenth Century Ireland, 1485-1603
Authors: Edwards R. Dudley , Quinn David B.
Published: August 2016

During the past generation substantial changes in perspective have taken place with regard to the sixteenth century in Irish history. European and British studies on this period have done much to confirm the continuance of essentially medieval society well into what it had become customary to regard as the modern period, while the clarification of successive stages of growth and change in the early modern period has also enabled Ireland in the later sixteenth century to be seen rather more clearly in its European context. Intimations of this change may be seen in the treatment of Ireland in this period in J. C. Beckett’s A short history of Ireland (1952 and subsequent editions), and more specifically in the most recent composite book on Ireland, The course of Irish history, edited by T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (1967), where the contributions by Art Cosgrove on ‘ The Gaelic resurgence and the Geraldine supremacy, c. 1400–1534 ’ and by G. A. Hayes-McCoy on ‘ The Tudor conquest, 1534–1603 ’, bring out very well the place of sixteenthcentury Ireland in the general sequence of its past. At the same time, it is clear that although the main contributions of this generation to the detailed understanding of sixteenth-century Ireland have added much that is new in information and interpretation they have yet not quite reached a position where a complete new synthesis of the period has seemed possible, however necessary it may be. There is no doubt that the understanding of the growing group of Irish historians interested in this period has been steadily expanding, that this understanding increasingly informs their specialist articles, and that it also finds its ripest expression at the level of synthesis rather in their university lectures than in print.
John Toland (1670–1722), Donegal heretic
Authors: Simms J.G.
Published: August 2016

John Toland was one of the most remarkable of Swift’s Irish contemporaries. He was a man of many parts and extraordinary versatility: a linguist with some claims to scholarship, a political propagandist and a speculative-thinker. At the same time, he was brash and indiscreet, with the result that he fell out with one patron after another and was forced to make a precarious living as a Grub Street hack. But his writings influenced later generations, were translated into French and German, and gave him an international reputation as one of the forerunners of the age of reason.
William King and the threats to the Church of Ireland during the reign of James II
Authors: Carpenter Andrew
Published: August 2016

During the latter part of the reign of James II, the Church of Ireland was in a position of considerable delicacy. On the one hand, there was a real fear that the church would face annihilation at the hands of the ruling administration; if the threats of the catholic population had come to fruition, if the statutes passed by the Jacobite parliament of 1689 had been put into effect or if the Tyrconnell administration had remained in power any longer than it did, this fear would almost certainly have been realized. On the other hand, by the spring of 1689, Anglican churchmen could see that a Williamite victory might spell for them—as it did for the Church of Scotland—summary disestablishment. Most Irish Anglicans had already fled to England, thereby lending support to the Williamites; the northern presbyterians had actually taken up arms on the Williamite side. Only the remnant of the Church of Ireland left in Dublin seemed to be disloyal to the protestant king: and this remnant, to save its skin, had to continue outwardly loyal to its de jure and de facto monarch, James II. Whatever the outcome of the war which they all foresaw, the leaders of the remnant of the Church of Ireland can have held little hope for the future. A Jacobite victory would almost certainly mean the triumph of the catholic church and the despoiling of the Church of Ireland: a Williamite victory might well mean the triumph of the presbyterians and a partial disestablishment. In either case the Church of Ireland, dependent for its very existence on a firm establishment, would founder.
The I.R.B. from the treaty to 1924
Authors: O’Beirne-Ranelagh John
Published: August 2016

During the Irish war for independence from 1916 to 1921, there were three important groups involved on the Irish side against Britain. These were Sinn Féin, the I.R.A. (Irish Republican Army) and the I.R.B. (Irish Republican Brotherhood).

Sinn Féin became in 1917 the political arm of the republicar movement for an independent Ireland. In the December 1918 general, election, Sinn Féin candidates won seventy-three of the 103 Irish constituencies and formed Dáil Eireann in January 1919. The dáil stood apart from the military side of the national struggle until March 1921, when it accepted responsibility for the activities of the I.R.A.
Thomas Sheridan (1646-1712) and his ‘Narrative’
Authors: Miller John
Published: August 2016

A part from the surviving state papers (notably those of Lord Lieutenant Clarendon) one of the most important sources for the history of Ireland in the reign of James II is the ‘Narrative’ written in 1702 by Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan was appointed secretary to Lord Deputy Tyrconnell and first commissioner of the revenue at the end of 1686 and was dismissed, following allegations of corruption, early in 1688. Sheridan claimed that James had made him secretary against Tyrconnell’s wishes so that he could watch Tyrconnell’s behaviour on his behalf, and that Tyrconnell fabricated the charges of corruption in order to be rid of him. Most historians, especially those hostile to Tyrconnell, have accepted Sheridan’s account as accurate. Sir James Mackintosh, for example, wrote : ‘Clarendon and Sheridan’s MSS agree so exactly in their picture of Tyrconnell, have such an air of truth in their accounts of him that it is not easy to refuse them credit, though they were both his enemies’.
Early modern Ireland
Authors: Cregan Donal F.
Published: August 2016

The publication of the first volume of A new history of Ireland to be issued from the press (volume iii of a set of nine volumes) is an event of the utmost significance in Irish historiography. It is the first-fruit of an ambitious proposal originally given an airing by Professor T. W. Moody in his presidential address to the Irish Historical Society in December 1962 and since pursued by him, through protracted discussions and negotiations, with rare tenacity, skill and devotion. In a longer perspective it is the culmination of forty years of sustained historical endeavour, which in its beginnings saw the foundation in 1936 of the Ulster Society for lrish Historical Studies and of the Irish Historical Society, and the first publication in 1938 of Irish Historical Studies, the journal sponsored by both societies, of which Professor Moody has since been joint editor.
XXXIV Rowland White’s ‘Discors Touching Ireland’, c. 1569
Authors: Canny Nicholas
Published: August 2016

This selected document was forwarded to Sir William Cecil in March 1571, but it was probably composed some years previously, and almost certainly before the Irish parliament of 1569–71 had assembled. It is transcribed from a copy, bearing the name of Secretary Thomas Wilson, which survives among the State Papers, Ireland in the Public Record Office, London (S.P 63, vol. 31, no. 32, ff 73–117). The piece is considered worthy of presentation because it is the most comprehensive analysis of the social and political condition of sixteenth century Ireland made by an Irish-born contemporary; because it indicates how the author’s perception of the world differed from that of the majority of Englishmen who commented on Ireland; and because it can be established that White’s opinions were shared by other articulate people within the Pale. The document, which is disposed of in nine lines in the Calendar of state papers Ireland, 1509–73, also serves to illustrate how grossly inadequate is that series for the sixteenth century.
The Suppression of the Irish Presidency System
Authors: Irwin Liam
Published: August 2016

The suppression of the Irish provincial presidencies in August 1672 has received scant attention from historians. Scarcity of surviving source material has resulted in little serious scholarship being devoted to this particular form of regional government. This basic handicap was intensified by the circumstances of the decision to terminate the system. No serious abuses existed in its operation and no demand for its removal was evident yet the decision was implemented without official explanation. As a result most writers on restoration Ireland have confined themselves to brief and guarded generalisations when dealing with the subject.
The Irish-Portuguese trade dispute, 1770-90
Authors: Lammey David
Published: August 2016

One dispute in Irish history which has not been given the attention it deserves is that which involved Britain, Ireland and Portugal during the years 1780-87 Authors of outline Irish histories, Lecky, Murray, George O’Brien and McDowell only mention the dispute briefly in their respective narratives, though it is clear they understood its importance to some degree at least. Maurice O’Connell, who has produced the only specialist study for the period in question, makes no reference to the dispute at all. This dispute has indeed been more substantially treated by the British historian, John Ehrman, within the general context of an analysis of the British government’s commercial negotiations from 1783 to 1793. However, the perspective he draws relates purely to Britain and Portugal, which, in itself, narrows the true significance of an episode which was important in that it completely undermined the benefits Ireland hoped to accrue from the free-trade legislation of 1779-80, and also because it raised a number of interesting questions relative to Ireland’s constitutional status vis-à-vis of Great Britain.
Priests and patriots: Irish separatism and fear of the modern, 1890-1914
Authors: Garvin Tom
Published: August 2016

The political leadership of the independent state that emerged after 1920 was formed in the years after the fall of Parnell in 1891. The cultural atmosphere of the period in which the new leaders had grown up was suffused with a nationalist and anti-modernist romanticism, a sense that a civilisation was perhaps dying and a scepticism about the possibility or even desirability of mass democracy As has been argued elsewhere, the young men and women who were to lead the separatist movement were children of their time. Like their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, they sensed that the twentieth century would bring great changes; they anticipated with dread or longing the great wars that so many writers predicted; they tended to rebel against their elders, often in the name of ideals inculcated by those elders; they tended toward a romantic and messianic nationalism.' They tended also to think moralistically rather than scientifically; their social thought was derived from ethics rather than from politics or economics. The culture from which they came was dominated by a catholic world-view, and their real intellectual mentors were the priests of the catholic church.
Walter Long and the making of the Government of Ireland Act, 1919–20
Authors: Murphy Richard
Published: August 2016

From the autumn of 1918 until late in 1919 home rule was dead as a practical issue in British politics, and the government concerned itself with the administration in Ireland and the means by which republican violence might be stamped out. During the spring and summer of 1918 Lloyd George had attempted to follow what he called the ‘dual policy’ — home rule in return for military compulsion — and a cabinet committee, under the chairmanship of Walter Long, had drafted a home-rule bill which, in view of the deteriorating situation in Ireland, the cabinet had refused to take up. This bill had foreshadowed the basic outlines of the settlement which was to be embodied in the Government of Ireland Act more than two years later Despite the considerable historical attention given to Anglo-Irish affairs in the period 1918-22 comparatively little attention has been paid to the making of the Government of Ireland Act, though it was this piece of legislation which laid the basis for partition. The act is something of an historical aberration in that its application within nationalist Ireland was superseded within less than a year of reaching the statute book, for the treaty of 6 December 1921 effectively repealed it by granting full dominion status.
Medieval Bristol and Dublin
Authors: Gwynn Aubrey
Published: August 2016

In 1930 the Bristol Record Society printed as the first volume of their Publications the complete text of Bristol’s earliest charters from 1155 to 1373. The text was prepared by the city archivist, Miss N. Dermott Harding, who was also responsible for a full translation of each document, and an accurate description of the various ancient records and documents from which the text was taken. But there was no attempt at an adequate historical survey of all this material. A second volume was planned which should carry the story down to the end of the medieval period, and Miss Harding ended her short introduction with the remark : ‘[This] is in no sense an exhaustive book of reference on the documents it contains. It is, literally, a bare text-book, providing, without other comment than the technical work of transcription required, a printed substitute for manuscript material. Research upon it is left for the users of the text, in the hope that they may find it a reliable and accurate basis for their work, saving them the task of difficult and troublesome search through the originals.’
Opposition in late eighteenth-century Ireland: the case of the Townshend viceroyalty
Authors: Bartlett Thomas
Published: August 2016

Political life in Ireland in the third quarter of the eighteenth century was disturbed by three major opposition campaigns. From 1753 to 1756 there was the so-called money bill dispute in which Henry Boyle (later first earl of Shannon) mounted a formidable and largely successful opposition to the designs of the Dublin Castle administration for replacing him as chief undertaker. The years 1769-71 saw a noisy but ineffective opposition to Viscount Townshend’s plans for re-modelling the way Ireland was governed. And from 1778 to 1783 there was the famous patriot opposition led by Henry Grattan and Henry Flood which won for Ireland ‘a free trade’ and the ‘constitution of ’82’ The first and last ofthese opposition campaigns have been studied in detail; but the opposition to Townshend has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because the result was so unequivocally a victory for the Castle and hence less ‘heroic’ in its outcome than the other two campaigns. This paper sets out in the first instance to correct this imbalance by examining the reasons for the failure of the Irish opposition to Townshend.
Brahmins and carnivores: the Irish historian in Great Britain
Authors: Boyce D. G.
Published: August 2016

This paper is concerned with the teaching of Irish history in Great Britain, with the students, the teachers and their subject. Each merits a brief mention before any detailed discussion, in order to draw attention to the problems that exist, and to clear up any misunderstanding or ignorance about the task that is to be performed.

In the great controversy between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine occasioned by the French Revolution, Paine made at least one telling remark in his refutation of Burke’s defence of tradition and usage: he declared that an hereditary monarch was about as sensible as an hereditary mathematician. An hereditary Irish studies student in Great Britain makes about as much sense as both. Much nonsense is talked about the inherited genes of the Irish in Britain, on the assumption that (somehow) an interest in, and ability to comprehend, Irish studies can be transmitted from one generation of Irish immigrants to another. This may be the case; but if it is, it probably takes its rise from social rather than hereditary factors; and it is no more likely to produce an intelligent, perceptive student of Ireland than of France.
Anglo-Irish shire government in the thirteenth century
Authors: Otway-Ruthven Jocelyn
Published: August 2016

The organization of the medieval Anglo-Irish lordship was designed to reproduce as exactly as possible the administrative system of England, but it was not introduced suddenly or all at once. Of the eleven shires which were governed by royal sheriffs at the end of the thirteenth century, Dublin is the only one which can be traced back to the twelfth century, and even then does not appear in the records till the 1190’s. It seems probable that at this date no other shire yet existed in Ireland, though it is possible that Waterford, with Cork, was already organized as a shire.
The machinery of the Irish parliamentary party, 1880-85
Authors: O’Brien Conor Cruise
Published: August 2016

The history of modern political parties is rich in examples of the law that a sharp change in the party line involves a tightening in party discipline, often including a structural re-organization. The Parnellite movement did not escape the operation of this law. The Kilmainham treaty, which marked the transmutation of Parnellism from a quasi-revolutionary movement into a completely constitutional one, could not have been implemented without a drastic subordination of the various branches of the movement to central control, i.e. the control of the parliamentary party itself. As the party had been reduced by secessions until it contained, for all practical purposes, no opponents of Parnell, this meant that the whole great movement of the ‘New Departure’, or what was left of it, was now to be steered, by the little group of Parnell’s lieutenants, out of land-agitation into the more or less peaceful ways of electioneering. It was not immediately necessary to tighten the internal organization of the party itself, partly because of the secessions and partly because its make-up was such that it was inclined to welcome rather than oppose shifts to the right. What was needed was to discipline the ‘peripheral organizations’, as they would now be called, one or two of which had in the past not merely acted independently of the parliamentarians but had exercised some control over them. Before going further with the description of how the party machine was perfected in the years following the Kilmainham treaty, it might be well, for the sake of clarity, to list these organizations and indicate briefly their relation to the parliamentary party in the immediate pre-Kilmainham era.
Bishop Nicholas French and the second Ormond peace, 1648-9
Authors: Corish Patrick J.
Published: August 2016

Europe in the seventeenth century was a land of mar and confusion because the great political problems raised by the religious disruption of the preceding century had not yet been solved. Chief among these was the problem of the relations between the Roman catholic church and a protestant state. The teaching of the pope's indirect power in temporal matters in any problem involving a breach of the moral order (ratione peccati) had been strongly re-stated by Bellarmine, and was the official attitude of the church. A protestant prince had committed a grave sin, that of heresy, and so it was the pope's right and duty to depose him and absolve his Catholic subjects from their allegiance. But this political theory was becoming impractical as the seventeenth century progressively demonstrated that Europe was permanently divided. As might be expected, juridical forms lagged behind the development of events; but by the middle of the century the Roman curia, while not prepared to give antecedent approval to a peace with protestants, might be said to be ready to acquiesce once it had been concluded, if the position and rights of the Catholic church could be assured. Yet this assurance was, in the circumstances, almost impossible. The Catholic church could not rest satisfied with toleration as a sect, but demanded recognition as an organised society with a source of jurisdiction illdependent of the state.
The machinery of the Irish parliamentary party in the general election of 1895
Authors: Lyons F.S.L.
Published: August 2016

Each of the general elections that took place between 1885 and 1910 was significant in the history of the party, but that of 1895 had an interest peculiar to itself, setting it apart from the others in the series. It was not an election which brought about any major change in the relative strength of the various parties; it was not even notable for the number of seats to be contested. Nor was it fought upon any major issue of policy, since it was obvious to all but the most optimistic that home rule was not—and for a long time was not likely to be—a matter of practical politics; even the question of whether or not to continue the liberal alliance—a question hotly debated ever since Lord Rosebery's unpromising reference to home rule in March 1894—seemed largely academic in view of the probability of a unionist victory in Great Britain. For the Irish party—or, to speak more precisely, for the anti-Parnellites—the importance of the election of 1895 lay in quite a different direction; it lay in the fact that as a result of this campaign the methods whereby in the past the party had controlled the conduct of the elections over a large part of Ireland were deeply and permanently discredited, and the party itself confronted with a very serious crisis. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the development of that crisis, but before proceeding to consider it in detail, it will be necessary to describe very briefly the way in which this control over the elections was exercised.