The government’s incursion into the midlands lordships of the O’Connors and O’Mores in 1546 is often identified as the root of the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Conversely, the years from 1535 to 1546 have been depicted as a period wherein a conciliatory approach to Gaelic Ireland was favoured. This paper argues that the origins of the Tudor conquest lie in the 1530s following the Kildare Rebellion. At this time a majority of senior officials in Ireland urged the regional conquest of the lordships of the O’Byrnes, O’Tooles and MacMurrough Kavanaghs in Wicklow and Carlow. This strategy was not adopted as Henry VIII refused to finance such a costly endeavour. Consequently a cheap political alternative now known as ‘surrender and regrant’ was briefly adopted in the early 1540s. However in 1546 the officials who favoured regional intervention in Leinster succeeded in initiating an incursion into the midlands. In light of the links between the campaign for the reduction of south Leinster in the 1530s and the incursion into the midlands in 1546, this paper argues that the origins of the Tudor conquest of Ireland can be traced to the campaign for the reduction of south Leinster in the mid-1530s.

The recent digitisation of the 1641 depositions has opened up that large and controversial collection of manuscripts to renewed study. The significance of a substantial section of that archive generated in 1653–4 by the work of the Cromwellian delinquency commissions has hitherto been poorly understood. This article sheds new light on the workings of the commissions and on the ways in which the ‘delinquency depositions’ that they collected helped to shape the implementation of the Cromwellian and Restoration land settlements in Ireland. It also compares the Irish delinquency proceedings to the approach adopted by the Long Parliament in its dealings with royalists in England in the 1640s. In analysing the actual content of the depositions, the article focuses particular attention on County Wexford. The surviving delinquency depositions enable in-depth exploration of many facets of the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath in that region.

In September 1828, societies of the ‘Friends of Ireland’ were founded throughout the United States and British North America for the purpose of raising funds and disseminating propaganda in support of the O’Connellite campaign for Catholic emancipation. In March 1831, the societies were briefly revived to agitate for repeal of the Union. The first Irish diasporic social movement to appear in Britain’s overseas empire, the British North American Friends of Ireland enjoyed greatest support in French-speaking Lower Canada, where for a time sympathetic local patriotes perceived a common cause with their new Irish neighbours. This article explores the transatlantic reciprocal interactions, cross-ethnic alliances and regional distinctions which characterised early O’Connellism in Lower Canada. It follows its initial successes to its virtual collapse in the early 1830s, as an increasingly polarised Lower Canada slid towards rebellion. Comparisons are employed with similar agitation elsewhere in British North America, in the United States, and in Ireland. It is argued that instrumentalist explanations for Irish diasporic nationalism, typically drawn from studies of post-famine Irish-America, do not convincingly account for the appearance and form of O’Connellite nationalism in British North America.

The evangelical revival of 1859 remains a pivotal event in the religious culture of Ulster Protestants owing to its legacy of widespread conversion, church renewal, and its role in shaping the pan-Protestantism of Ulster society that later opposed Irish home rule. Being part of a wider transatlantic movement of religious awakening, the 1859 revival was seen as the culmination of thirty years of evangelical renewal within Irish Presbyterianism. What has often been overlooked, however, is the fact that many aspects of the revival were deeply troubling to orthodox Presbyterians. Although most Ulster Presbyterians were largely supportive of the movement, an intellectually significant minority dissented from what they saw as its spectacular, doctrinal, liturgical, ecclesiological, and moral aberrations. Given 1859’s mythological status among Ulster evangelicals, it is normally assumed that all who opposed the revival were either religious formalists or those of heterodox doctrinal opinions. It will be argued that such an assumption is deeply misguided, and that the Presbyterian opponents of 1859 were motivated by zeal for confessional Reformed theology and Presbyterian church-order. By focusing on theologically conservative opposition to an ostensible evangelical and Calvinistic awakening, this article represents a significant contribution to the existing historiography of not only the Ulster revival but of religious revivalism more generally. It also helps us to understand the long-term evolution of Ulster Presbyterian belief and practice in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

On 21 January 1919, the first Dáil adopted four constitutional documents, the best known of which is the Democratic Programme, a statement of social values, based on proposals from the Labour Party. The Programme is usually regarded as a cynical reward to Labour for its abstention from the 1918 general election, and nationalist elites have frequently been criticised for reneging on it. This paper will argue that the Programme was written to advance the Irish cause at the International Socialist Conference at Berne in February 1919, that parts of the Programme were implemented, and that it is very likely that the Labour Party did not write it to be implemented.

In 1963 the Second Vatican Council voted overwhelmingly to introduce the vernacular into Roman Catholic worship. The Irish hierarchy decided that both Irish and English speakers should be catered for in the reformed liturgy. Within a few years John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin, had gained a widespread reputation as having gone further than his fellow bishops in the provision of masses in Irish. At the same time he was criticised for his lack of enthusiasm towards other areas of liturgical reform. This dichotomy stemmed from McQuaid’s deep dismay at the church’s new ecumenical direction and the possibility that it would lead to shared worship between Catholics and Protestants. Yet, as a senior prelate in the Catholic Church, he was obliged to implement each of the Council’s decrees, including those concerning the liturgy. McQuaid’s response was to introduce Vatican-approved changes to the mass, while simultaneously protecting the traditional liturgy he cherished. So he tried to re-establish the Latin rite on the same terms as those he had arranged for the Irish mass. Had he succeeded, the result would have been a reduction in the use of an English vernacular which he found offensive to his Catholic sensibilities.