The kidnapping by the local chief, O'Connor Faly, of Henry VIII's governor, Lord Delvin, in 1528 plunged the Dublin administration into crisis. Delvin was the most obvious – but not entirely surprising – casualty of an ingenious but flawed experiment by the king, aimed at bolstering as governor a reliable border baron by harnessing to his governorship the manraed of the traditional ruling magnate, so saving the cost to the king of a border garrison. Delvin's weak administration underlined the low priority accorded to Irish affairs at Henry VIII's court; but even after its predictable collapse, the king disclaimed responsibility. Against advice at court and in Ireland, the king then insisted on reappointing a previously unsuccessful governor, thus simply compounding the difficulties faced by the Dublin administration.

The marquess of Ormond's surrender of Dublin to the forces of the English parliament in the summer of 1647 has been seen as marking the demise of the Church of Ireland, with ministers given the choice of adopting the Presbyterian Directory for Public Worship or fleeing the country. This article examines the survival of the church thanks to the benign influence of the governor of Dublin, Colonel Michael Jones, and his brother, Dr Henry Jones, bishop of Clogher. Under Michael Jones's rule the Book of Common Prayer continued to be used, ministers were appointed to vacancies, and clerical networks continued to operate. It was only after the Cromwellian invasion in August 1649, and the replacement of Jones by the Cromwellian hard-liner, Colonel John Hewson, that the church was forced out of business – a process completed with its formal abolition by the autumn of 1650.

On the Ulster borderlands, the years 1849 to 1852 represented a crucial period in the development of a correlation between agrarian violence and constitutional political agitation. The emergence of the Tenant League in the region from 1848, along with a parallel clandestine violence from 1849, foreshadowed the better-known Land War of the latter part of the nineteenth century. This article analyses the hitherto unacknowledged interplay between agrarian violence and constitutional politics in south Armagh and surrounding districts. In so doing, it emphasises the years in the immediate wake of the Great Famine as being critical in the long-term development of more politicised forms of collective action. Such methods, in turn, would ultimately be deployed to the detriment of the landed ascendancy in subsequent decades.

The Gaelic League was founded in 1893 with the aim of reviving the Irish language, as well as promoting home-grown industries and social reform. By the turn of the century, it had become one of the most important cultural organisations in Ireland. This article studies a central element of the league's ideology and praxis, albeit one that has thus far received little attention: its promotion of a specifically nationalist understanding of Irish space. ‘Space’ was a key trope for the Gaelic League and was linked to a number of other dominant nationalist concerns: state sovereignty, race, gender and modernity. Moreover, this article argues that a focus on ‘space’ allows for a better comparative understanding of Irish nationalism, since similar spatial logics were at play in other late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century national movements both in Europe and in the (post)colonial world.

The 1924–5 fundraising tour in Australia by republican activists, Kathleen Barry and Linda Kearns, although successful, has received little attention from historians, more focused on the controversial tour of Fr Michael O'Flanagan and J. J. O'Kelly the previous year. While O'Flanagan and O'Kelly's tour ended with their deportation, Barry and Kearns successfully navigated the different agendas of Irish-Australian political and social groups to organise speaking engagements and raise considerable funds for the Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependants' Fund. The women were experienced republican activists, however on their Australian tour they placed themselves firmly in traditional female patriotic roles, as nurturers and supporters of men fighting for Irish freedom. This article analyses their strategic use of gendered expectations to allay suspicions about their political agenda to successfully raise money and negotiate with political and ecclesiastical leaders.

By using the League of Nations and United Nations as case studies, this article identifies the women working at the diplomatic level in the Irish Department of External Affairs (D.E.A.) in the period 1923–76. Drawing on gender analysis, the article assesses where men and women were positioned in Irish diplomacy and asks if the role of women in the D.E.A. was shaped by a gendered viewpoint. It argues that there were more opportunities for women within the United Nations than the League of Nations and it questions if these increased diplomatic opportunities were reflective of women's changing status within the D.E.A. in the period under investigation. Overall, the article offers a new perspective on the conduct of Irish foreign policy between 1923 and 1976.

This article examines a letter from Cavan's political elite to the lord deputy and council in July 1629 in protest against the imposition of charges relating to the Graces. The letter, with its graphic description of a county gripped by famine, tells us much about conditions on the ground at this time. What is most interesting about this petition, however, are the more than one hundred signatures appended to it. The names include a mix of both Gaelic Irish and British settlers and indicate a plantation county whose two communities were prepared to work with each other, on this occasion at least, in order to achieve a common goal.