The object of the present essay is to suggest that the mainstream tradition of Irish historical scholarship, as it has developed since the 1930s, has been vitiated by a faulty methodological procedure. The study falls into two parts. The first considers a similar exercise conducted in this journal by Dr Steven Ellis in 1986. The intention here is to suggest that Ellis’s analysis of the problem is misconceived. The second part seeks to explore the problem ‘as it really is’ and ultimately to prescribe a remedy. Continuity between the two parts is provided by the fact that the issue comes down to a consideration of the place of nationalism as a formative influence on modern Irish historical scholarship. In short, Ellis sees nationalism as a proactive force in this connexion and identifies ‘whig-nationalist’ preconceptions as the basic source of confusion. The first part of this study, therefore, is concerned to refute that analysis and to show that the evidence adduced by Ellis does not sustain it. The second part argues that the modern tradition actually developed in self-conscious reaction against an earlier nationalist tradition of historical interpretation and aspired to produce ‘value-free’ history in accordance with the criteria of scientific research elaborated in Herbert Butterfield’s The whig interpretation of history. It will be argued that that is precisely the problem.

Why the Reformation failed in Ireland was, until recent years, a matter for little debate. That it failed was beyond question and that its failure was inevitable was a premise seldom challenged. For many Irish historians, the root of its failure lay in the unswerving faith of a gallant people who resisted the attempts of a conquering force to impose upon them a creed at once heretical and foreign. Indeed, it was not until Brendan Bradshaw initiated a whole new approach to the history of the sixteenth century that this kind of view began to be firmly discarded. Others, like Nicholas Canny and, more recently, Steven Ellis and Alan Ford, have joined Bradshaw in questioning some of the old orthodoxies. The result of these endeavours has been, above all, to uncover the fact that the course of the Reformation in Ireland and the reasons for its failure were infinitely more complex than we once believed and, rather unexpectedly, one of the most tantalising issues raised by the debates which Bradshaw’s work has provoked has been the problem of precisely when the Reformation may be said to have failed in Ireland. Bradshaw and Canny have conflicting answers to that question and some of them will be considered here.

The election contests of 1900 in St Stephen’s Green and South County Dublin were covered in detail by newspapers throughout the British Isles and have been treated as a political watershed by more recent and scholarly commentators. This interest has had a partly personal and biographical inspiration since one of the unionist candidates for South Dublin was the agrarian reformer and junior minister, Horace Plunkett; but the significance, symbolic and actual, of these contests has been seen as extending beyond the participation of one prominent Edwardian Irishman. The defeat of two unionist M.P.s, Plunkett and Campbell, in a fairly static Irish electoral arena would in itself have been worthy of comment. But the association of these men with a constructive administrative programme for Ireland, combined with the fact of their defeat by dissident unionists, gave the contests a broader notoriety and a significance for policy formulation which they would not otherwise have had. With the benefit of hindsight it has also been suggested that the repudiation of Plunkett and Campbell was a landmark in the gradual decline of southern unionism in Ireland. For, though South Dublin briefly returned to the unionist party between 1906 and 1910, the defeats of 1900 effectively marked the end of unionism as a significant electoral movement outside Ulster. After 1900, as the historian W.E.H. Lecky observed, ‘Ulster unionism is the only form of Irish unionism which is likely to count as a serious political force’.

The issue of citizenship played a major role in the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; but that point was overshadowed by the tendency of those who negotiated the treaty (and the authors who have written about it) to see the issue of ‘common citizenship’ as only one point under the heading of allegiance to the crown and membership of the British Empire. That it was a central issue is clear, however, for at one point in the 1921 negotiations Lloyd George asked, ‘to put it bluntly will you be British subjects or foreigners? You must be either one or the other.’ Arthur Griffith, the leader of the Irish delegation, answered: ‘in our proposal we have agreed to “reciprocity of civic rights”. We should be Irish and you would be British and each would have equal rights as citizens in the country of the other.’ That exchange caused the British to ask the Irish for a direct answer to the question, would they ‘acknowledge this common citizenship?’. The Irish, however, only responded with the words, ‘Ireland would undertake such obligations as are compatible with the status of a free partner’ in ‘the community of nations known as the British Commonwealth’. Those words did not satisfy the English negotiators, but in the end the Irish accepted an agreement in which the words ‘common citizenship’ appeared in the oath to the king which all members of Dáil Éireann would have to take. That satisfied the British demands on allegiance to the crown.