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.

During a twelve-week period in the late summer of 1828 upwards of a quarter of a million people participated in at least sixty mass demonstrations in the south-west of Ireland. Appearing to erupt spontaneously in response to Daniel O’Connell’s historic victory in the County Clare election in early July, these gatherings grew in size and complexity over the succeeding weeks; by late September jubilant but well-ordered assemblies of twenty and thirty thousand people — many marching in identical green uniforms and with military precision behind bands and colourful banners — were taking place simultaneously in several County Tipperary towns to support O’Connell’s crusade for Catholic emancipation.

Political demonstrations on this scale were virtually unprecedented outside the province of Ulster. While processions and large rallies had sometimes been used to honour important politicians during parliamentary elections, and while they had long been part of civic, military and religious pageantry, they had never before been staged in such a co-ordinated and prolonged fashion. What made these spectacles particularly remarkable, however, was that their participants were mainly drawn from the very lowest ranks of rural society and represented groups which had hitherto been excluded from the political process. The novelty of such people marching so often with uniforms and other military regalia caused widespread bewilderment and alarm. Journalists and magistrates liberally sprinkled their descriptions of the meetings with phrases such as ‘novel’, ‘portentous’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘frightful’, and ‘the strangest scene ever witnessed’. One of them observed that had such displays taken place even a few years earlier, they ‘would not only have been deemed factious but treasonable’. As the meetings swelled, many observers thought them to be the harbingers of a mass uprising.

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party.

The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.

In 1913 part of the enormous fortune of the American millionaire John D. Rockefeller was put aside for philanthropic and charitable purposes under the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation. Throughout the twentieth century the Rockefeller Foundation disbursed money to a wide range of economic, scientific and artistic projects. Among its interests were health and medical research, and Rockefeller invested funds in public health programmes throughout the world for the eradication of particular diseases or to strengthen the effectiveness of existing public health structures.

The Rockefeller Foundation was also interested in providing aid for the reorganisation and modernisation of medical education. It was, however, loath to part with any of its monies unless it was assured of the political and social stability of a country, and also of the competence, honesty and good intentions of those to whom it entrusted funds. In order to assess this, the officers of the Rockefeller Foundation visited potential recipients. They reported back to the New York headquarters of the Foundation on the political and social background of the countries to which assistance might be given and also on the feasibility of the programmes of assistance devised to help them.

Academic study of the development of Irish political parties has been hampered by a shortage of primary source material available to historians and political scientists. This is because the headquarters records of parties, where they have survived, are generally fragmentary and ill-organised, and because few national politicians or party organisers have left papers for research.

The shortage of primary sources on the major political parties is reflected in the standard academic works dealing with their development, from Maurice Manning’s Irish political parties (1972) and Michael Gallagher’s The Irish Labour Party in transition, 1957–1982 (1982) to Richard Dunphy’s recent The making of Fianna Fáil power in Ireland (1995). These are largely based on secondary sources, on interviews, and on the private papers of individual politicians. Where scholars have had access to party records, furthermore, it has generally been on an informal and improvised basis. It was in such circumstances that John Bowman, while preparing De Valera and the Ulster question, 1917–1973 (1982), and Dermot Keogh, while researching Ireland and Europe, 1919–1948 (1988), were given sight of some of the records of the Fianna Fail national executive committee and the parliamentary party.

Christine Kinealy has claimed that ‘more has been written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine than was written in the whole period since 1850’. This is probably true. Anniversaries of major historical events now give rise to commemorative events ranging from scholarly conferences to the unveiling of memorial plaques, even to pop concerts. There appears to be a premium on being first in the field, and a corresponding waning of interest as attention shifts to the next anniversary. Harvard University organised its conference marking the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1988. The summer of 1847 was taken as the cutoff point for the Irish government’s official commemoration of the Famine, in order to make way for the bicentenary of 1798, despite the fact that a majority of famine victims probably died after that date. Commemorating historical events boosts book sales, and publishers appear eager to respond to popular demand. Unfortunately the interest may prove too short-lived to afford time for major research, and many of the resulting books either recycle existing material or give the appearance of being in need of further work.

Politics in the era of Parnell and his contemporaries continues to exert immense fascination. The five biographical (in the instance of Philip Bull’s book semi-biographical) studies surveyed add ample texture to understanding this much-ploughed field. At the same time these works demonstrate the importance of biography as a tool for interpreting the past. Doubt about the value of biography as a form of academic historical inquiry has recently been revived by the director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, Patrick O’Brien. O’Brien insists that ‘unless the outcomes of a policy or set of policies are recognised by historians as significant and until those policies can be attributed in large measure to the ideas and leadership exercised by prominent politicians, then their lives, however deeply researched and readable, contribute very little to an understanding of the history of government and politics’. None of these studies were written with his strictures in mind, but they may well serve as a collective refutation, at least as far as the Irish past is concerned. They are also a testimony to the impress of F. S. L. Lyons on modern scholarship, if only in the sense that several challenge his verdicts.