The name ‘Peep of Day Boys’, or the less common variant ‘Break of Day Men’, has become most closely linked with the Armagh disturbances beginning in the 1780s. In particular, the Peep of Day Boys are known as the group that metamorphosed into the Orange Order after the ‘battle of the Diamond’ in north Armagh in 1795. In recent years David Miller has done much to provide a more subtle interpretation of the link between the Peep of Day Boys and the Orange Order, and more light has been shed on the nature of popular violence in Armagh by Miller, Jim Smyth and Louis Cullen. However, the origins of the term ‘Peep of Day Boys’ are still rather unclear. Many contemporaries believed that it was linked to Protestant searches for weapons in Catholic homes at daybreak.

For social reformers in nineteenth-century Ireland, science had an important role to play in national development. Non-denominational or secular education was targeted by the government as a possible panacea for the Irish problem, submerging sectarian and political differences. In order to promote this secular ethos, the government established agencies such as the Board of National Education (B.N.E.) in 1831 and the Queen’s Colleges of Belfast, Cork and Galway in 1845. Science seemed to be an area of discourse particularly appropriate to the promotion of economic prosperity and social harmony through the common cause of education. The rhetoric of cultural transcendence was long associated with the advancement of science — from the Royal Society of London (1660) to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831) — and took root in nineteenth-century Ireland.

In 1859–60 the Risorgimento culminated in the unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia. Irish public opinion watched the process of unification with intense interest, largely because of the papacy’s involvement. The movement for unification directly threatened Pope Pius IX’s hold over the Papal States, and by 1860 he had lost all his dominions but Rome. As a result, Irish public opinion on the Risorgimento divided along the religious fault-line. Protestant identification with the struggle for unification was mirrored by passionate Catholic support for Pius IX, and Ireland’s longstanding religious animosities were projected onto the struggle between the pope and the Piedmontese. Perugia became Scullabogue, Spoleto Limerick. This sense of identification explains why events in Italy resonated so powerfully in Ireland. For religious ultras on both sides, the Risorgimento was essentially a religious struggle, a strategically important battle in the ongoing war between true religion and the powers of darkness.

The retention by the Fianna Fáil government of the land annuities in 1932 and the consequent trade dispute with Great Britain, the ‘economic war’, is a subject extensively covered in the existing historiography, both in terms of the diplomatic and economic facets of the dispute. Opposition by the opponents of Fianna Fáil to the collection of land annuities has been well documented in the context of the political conflict between supporters and opponents of the treaty. Another trend in the historiography has emphasised, as the central characteristic of the anti-annuity payment campaign, the opposition by farmers to the payment of annuities on economic and social rather than on political grounds. Paul Bew and others have argued that large farmers supported the Blueshirts during the ‘economic war’ for material reasons; Mike Cronin has argued that the crisis of the ‘economic war’ encouraged opposition to de Valera’s policies among farmers, rather than pro-Treaty political considerations; and Andrew Orridge has also argued that the anti-annuity payment campaign included both a political element, in the form of Blueshirt hostility to Fianna Fáil, and a non-political element, on the part of farmers protesting at how their dependence on agricultural exports to Britain was threatened by Fianna Fáil policies.

At the end of the 1960s the outbreak of widespread civil unrest in Northern Ireland forced the authorities in London and Dublin into confronting an issue which had seemingly been settled some time before. The emergence of the Civil Rights movement among the minority community and the reaction of unionist opinion to it had set in motion a series of events that were to raise once again the whole topic of partition. Yet for a short time in the period immediately following the Second World War it looked as if this subject was, to the delight of some and the dismay of others, about to re-emerge. One of the elements behind this development was the establishment by northern nationalists in 1945 of an organisation called the Irish Anti-Partition League (I.A.P.L.). The formation of the I.A.P.L. was significant on a number of grounds.