Ulick Burke, fifth earl of Clanricarde, presents a compelling character. His connections crossed the sectarian boundaries as well as the national borders of the Stuart kingdoms. He was the half brother of the earl of Essex, a prominent English noble, and later a general for the parliamentary cause. In fact, Clanricarde was one of very few of Charles I’s subjects who had gained footing in more than one of the Stuart kingdoms. He had significant landholdings in both England and Ireland, inheriting not only the Clanricarde and St Albans earldoms from his father, Richard Burke, but also following in the fourth earl’s footsteps as an important figure in the court of Charles I. The foundation was laid for many of his achievements by the fourth earl’s unwavering commitment to establishing himself as an English noble. However, the fifth earl eclipsed his father’s success at court when appointed an English Privy Counsellor in 1641.

The establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3, once regarded as a watershed in Irish constitutional history, has more recently and quite properly been reduced to an achievement of modest proportions. According to the new historiographical orthodoxy, Irish legislative independence was an aberration in a period of increasing British political control, and one that actually encouraged the British ruling class to pursue the political assimilation of Ireland into Britain by means of a union. Historians now have a tolerably clear picture of the process by which William Pitt and the British executive gradually became convinced that an incorporating union provided the best solution to the constitutional anomalies and sectarian difficulties posed by the government of Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s.

The 1886 general election found Parnell at the helm of a well-disciplined nationalist party. In its struggle for home rule, the Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.) had been helped along the way by the newly formed Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (I.P.H.R.A.), which in July 1886 had no fewer than six M.P.s in its ranks. Jeremiah Jordan, nationalist Member of Parliament for West Clare, was one of the six. Born in 1830 at Tattenbar, near Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, the son of a tenant farmer and a Wesleyan Methodist, he was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen. He started a grocery and provision business in Church Street, Enniskillen, and the town’s Young Men’s Society served as a training ground for his intellectual and oratorical skills, as did his appointment as a part-time Methodist lay preacher. Jordan had a passion for the sport of hunting and an intense dislike of idleness.

Twenty-four years ago, Terence Brown raised very few eyebrows when he portrayed the Irish Free State in the 1930s as an insular society obsessed with self-sufficiency. The theme of insularity has dominated most narratives of the period, with emphasis on the Anglo-Irish Economic War, the Censorship Board and the 1937 Constitution. The de Valera government’s intention in the Economic War, after all, was to create native industries behind high-tariff barriers and to favour agricultural labourers by shifting the tillage/pasture ratio in Ireland in favour of crop production. This protectionist programme was insularity writ large. Likewise, the government’s censorship of domestic and imported literature ‘concelebrated’, according to J. J. Lee, ‘the intellectual poverty of the period’.

The Allies developed Operation Safehaven towards the end of the Second World War in order to prevent a Nazi resurgence after the war. The overall goal of the programme was to create a census of German assets all over the world, with a particular focus on the European countries that had been neutral during the war. In addition to preventing the Nazis from regrouping, the idea also emerged among its developers that Safehaven could be employed to gather money for reparations to the victors and as compensation to Nazi victims. The process of persuading the neutrals to count and collect German assets proved lengthy, not least because Safehaven lacked an enforcement mechanism. There was little legal precedent for the Allies’ request to neutral and sovereign nations for assistance in their efforts. The negotiations with the various neutrals continued for years; in some cases, certain amounts of restitution were not paid until the 1990s.

Preserved amongst the Chancery masters’ exhibits at the National Archives of the U.K., formerly known as the Public Record Office, is a box of documents concerning the Fleming family, Lords Slane, in Ireland. These papers, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, relate primarily to a protracted inheritance dispute between the heirs male and heirs general of Christopher Fleming, Lord Slane, who died in 1458. This case had been brought into the English Chancery because the family were also landowners in Devon and Cornwall, and it had then rumbled on for decades. Within this box, however, there is also a parchment roll containing a number of entries relating to their Irish lands. The eighth item on this roll is especially interesting.