Criticism of the lord deputy of Ireland, Sir Anthony St Leger, became vocal during 1544, especially among supporters of James Butler, ninth earl of Ormond, who felt that he was being excluded from a more prominent role in government. To head off this grumbling, St Leger returned to England in the spring for an audience with Henry VIII that resulted in his re-appointment in July with the king's blessing. On 18 May he was installed as a knight of the Garter and his stipend increased by £200 the following summer. Once back in Ireland St Leger (a gentleman of the privy chamber) cleverly maintained royal favour through well-thought gifts, like the two goshawks and ‘caste’ of falcons ‘of the best ayre of this Lande’ he sent the king in the summer of 1545. Most importantly, he kept Henry, the English privy council, and principal courtiers informed of his point of view through carefully crafted letters and frequent messengers, dominating communications between the two kingdoms. His tone was always well-judged: ‘this your Realme remayneth[e] in goode stay thank[e]s be to god and your highnes’.

Richard O'Ferrall's claim of 5 March 1658 that the Stuart monarchy had no right to rule Ireland was made almost in passing. The real purpose of the report made by this Capuchin friar and courtier at the congregation of Propaganda Fide, the committee of cardinals whose jurisdiction included nearly all those missions and churches under non-Catholic governments, was to exclude all Irish Catholics of English descent from high ecclesiastical office. At the centre of his argument was the confederate Catholic association of the 1640s and the place within it of the Old English community. The Capuchin argued that the confederates had remained too closely bound to the Stuart monarchy, and that the Old English had betrayed the confederate cause to Charles I's lord lieutenant of Ireland, James Butler, earl, marquis and later duke of Ormond. Many of O'Ferrall's Catholic contemporaries saw him as a dangerous member of a radical tradition: a clerical assembly at Dublin in June 1666 burned his report along with a copy of Conor O'Mahony's Disputatio apologetica of 1645, which had argued that all Ireland's Protestants should be killed or expelled and a native king elected. The Commentarius Rinuccinianus, begun by O'Ferrall, developed the argument of the 1658 report on a grand scale.

William Nicholas Keogh (1817–1878) has long been remembered as the placehunting lawyer who betrayed his country and wrecked the political fortunes of Irish constitutional nationalism for a generation. As a member of the fifty-strong Irish Independent Party of the early 1850s, Keogh pledged himself to independent opposition, only to accept ministerial office in 1852 as solicitor-general for Ireland. For this act Keogh has long been represented as a man who succumbed to personal ambition at the expense of a popular cause, which he allegedly supported with the sole objective of extracting political capital. Such was the ignominy with which he came to be regarded in later years that his name became a byword for betrayal, as evidenced by the fact that members of John Redmond’s Edwardian Irish Parliamentary Party were characterised as the Keoghs and Sadleirs of their day. Keogh’s infamy was exacerbated further by the inflammatory judgment he issued when presiding over the Galway election petition of 1872, for which he would be labelled ‘villifier-in-ordinary of the Irish priests’.

If, as Thomas Flanagan has asserted, ‘the importance of John Mitchel's Jail journal to the tradition of Irish separatism has been underestimated’, the appearance of James Quinn's recent short biography of Mitchel is to be welcomed. Indeed, the remarkable thing is that Quinn's was the first book-length biography of Mitchel to be published since 1938. The biographical literature on Mitchel has veered between the hagiographic and the critical before settling, ultimately, into an apparent historiographical indifference. This essay examines Mitchel's biographies, his commemoration in periodical and ephemeral sources, and the development of the historiography of this most ardent republican, concluding that a renewed interest in Mitchel is timely.

On 19 December 1946, the Irish President, Seán T. O'Kelly, signed the Unemployment Insurance Act into law. This innocuous-sounding piece of legislation has received very little attention from historians, but was of great importance to one section of post-war Irish society. Under its terms, Dublin and London entered into a special scheme whereby Irish men and women who had served with the British forces during the Second World War were allowed to claim British unemployment insurance payments, while still resident in the twenty-six counties of independent Ireland. Coming at a time of unemployment and economic slump in Ireland, this was of crucial importance to many exservicemen. This article will explore the background, negotiation and implementation of the unemployment insurance agreement, and will speculate on the reasons why the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, agreed to it. It will also examine the British side of the scheme and explore London's motives, both concrete and notional.

In December 1973, the British and Irish governments and the Northern Ireland Executive designate agreed to the formal establishment of a ‘Council of Ireland’ as part of the historic Sunningdale Agreement. This council was to have executive functions and co-ordinate the provision of certain services on both sides of the border; it would have ‘executive and harmonising functions and a consultative role, and a consultative assembly with advisory and review functions’. The Council of Ireland proposal was the British government's formal recognition of the ‘Irish dimension’ which it had accepted in the March 1973 White Paper, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Proposals. The proposed council was one of the most divisive issues in Northern Ireland politics during the 1972–4 period, and was strongly resisted by a majority of unionists. The council issue led to the collapse of the power-sharing Executive which had taken office in January 1974. Loyalist opponents of Sunningdale argued that the Council of Ireland, if allowed to operate, would be a stepping-stone to a united Ireland. Recently, some scholars have retrospectively endorsed this interpretation of the council, arguing that the Irish government, in concert with the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (S.D.L.P.), sought a particularly strong institution – with the goal of Irish reunification. But was the proposed Council of Ireland really intended as a vehicle for future Irish unity?

Historians studying the Irish parliament in the first half of the eighteenth century generally have to make do with sources that are far less rich than those available at Westminster. In particular, division-lists, a staple of British parliamentary history, remain a relatively rare delicacy in Ireland. Only a dozen or so are known from the period 1692–1760, and hitherto none at all between the divisions on the disputed by-elections for Westmeath in 1723 and Dublin city in 1749. The discovery of another list, from the session of 1735–6, is thus particularly welcome, and would be so whatever its subject matter. But what makes this new list even more valuable is that it relates to a highly controversial division, closely associated with the production of Swift's notorious satire on the Irish House of Commons, ‘A character, panegyric and description of the Legion Club’, and also provides crucial evidence for the dating of that poem.