This paper explores the themes of abduction, patronage, female wealth and marital relationships through their intersection in the life of Derbforgaill (d. 1193), whose abduction in 1152 sparked a chain of events that contributed to the English invasion of Ireland. Derbforgaill is also remembered for her donations to Mellifont in 1157, during the consecration of its ‘church of the monks’, and to the construction of a nuns’ church in Clonmacnoise in 1167. Focusing on the broader political context of these donations offers strong grounds for reconsideration of both Derbforgaill's and other women's experiences. Among the wider implications of this study must be the reconceptualisation of female political importance as functional through or in concert with marriage partners, rather than the natal family.

An analysis of the multiple publications relating to the career of Hugh O'Neill that appeared during the middle decades of the twentieth century reveals the extent to which authors who were then writing about the past permitted their interpretations to be influenced by the politics and prejudices of their own time. It is then demonstrated that the various positions then adopted by competing authors had been influenced also by polemics from the past. A study of the place accorded to Hugh O'Neill by authors writing in the nineteenth, eighteenth, seventeenth and even the sixteenth century shows that they too were divided over whether O'Neill should be considered the forger of an Irish nation or a champion of Catholicism, or an ingrate who had betrayed the crown that had rescued him from obscurity. This leads to a discussion of academic writing of more recent decades and the efforts of scholars who have engaged on fresh research to better comprehend what motivated Hugh O'Neill at various junctures in his career, even as he remains one of the more enigmatic personalities in Ireland's history.

In the early twentieth century, Irish ethnic, benevolent and mutual benefit associations around the world became part of the transnational fight for Irish freedom, utilising large, widespread memberships to raise funds and lobby for Irish independence. In Australia and New Zealand the largest such group was the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society (H.A.C.B.S.), which boasted some 41,000 members spread across almost 600 branches in 1920. The society's engagement with the home rule movement and the subsequent Irish Revolution provides a fascinating example of how the expansive spatial and intergenerational networks of Irish-Catholic benevolent associations were mobilised in full support of Irish self-determination, particularly after 1919. Members of the H.A.C.B.S. in Australia had to negotiate complex and sometimes competing identities and loyalties: to Ireland, Australia and the British Empire, and the evolution of these tensions reflects the variety and complexity of global Irish nationalism. Reflecting patterns observed elsewhere, within a context of increasing sectarian tensions, labour militancy and broad Catholic disillusionment with their political and economic place in Australasian society, the H.A.C.B.S. moved from devout imperial loyalty in 1916 to total support for a fully independent Irish republic by 1922.

In 1912, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (A.O.H.) had become the most significant nationalist organisation in Ulster, a powerful auxiliary to the Irish Parliamentary Party, and a key part of what unionists feared would be Rome rule in a self-governed Ireland. However, while the A.O.H. is crucial to understanding nationalist Ulster and the border question, its reputation for fraternal secrecy and the apparent suddenness of its decline after the Irish Party's 1918 collapse has often seen it elude sustained academic enquiry. This article provides the first examination of the order from the Ulster crisis to the early decades of partition, drawing on the records of its governing Board of Erin. Scrutinising the grassroots and the leadership, this article interrogates dissension among Hibernians, the suspension of divisions and defections to Sinn Féin as the order reconciled proposals for Ulster exclusion with its traditional appeal. While Hibernians often found themselves part of a three-cornered conflict in the violent 1920s, the order ultimately survived on both sides of the border with regional variation important in estimating decline. Its persistence, therefore, illustrates something of the lived experience of partition and highlights important threads of continuity in a period of political and social upheaval.

The Belfast Boycott was a protest designed to dislodge loyalism in Northern Ireland, punish its adherents for perceived intolerance toward Catholics and end Irish partition. The boycott was set off by the expulsion of several thousand Catholic workers from employment in Belfast in July 1920. A total boycott of all goods coming from Belfast was implemented by the Dáil in September 1920. Boycotting provided Irish nationalists with an alternative to violent retaliation that allowed for the participation of a wider segment of the Irish population and diaspora in the revolutionary movement. However, such mass mobilisation meant that nationalists had to entrust their plan for an independent Ireland to a segment of the population that they overwhelmingly viewed as politically and economically uninformed: Irish women. The boycott offers a new vantage point from which to view the actions of and attitudes towards women and the role of mass mobilisation during the revolution. This article explores nationalists’ conceptions of Irish identity, the intersection between consumerism and patriotism, and the role that women played as both political and economic actors throughout the Irish revolutionary period.

This article examines the causes and consequences of the 1922 postal strike which was the first nationwide strike to occur following the establishment of the Irish Free State. In the eyes of the government, the dispute was as much a threat to its authority as that posed by anti-Treatyies, and it was resolved to crush both. The significance of the postal dispute within the annals of Irish labour history has been obscured and overshadowed by the civil war. The strike was not only about a demand for a fair and reasonable wage: it also raised issues relating to workers’ rights, including the right to strike; government tactics, including the harassment and intimidation of workers by the military; victimisation; political propriety and probity; the abuse of government power; and the role and effectiveness of the labour movement. Furthermore, the historical collision of both the postal strike and the civil war produced strong emotions among all parties to this labour dispute – the postal workers, postal unions and the fledgling government. The coincidence of the dispute and the civil war determined the government's attitude towards labour unrest, labour affairs and labour relations until Fianna Fáil succeeded Cumann na nGaedheal in 1932.

In late 1936, two Irishmen arrived in the Spanish Basque Country. One was General Eoin O'Duffy, signing the terms of agreement for an Irish Brigade to support the military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic. Meanwhile, socialist republican George Gilmore journeyed across the Pyrenees in search of a Basque nationalist priest he had met four years earlier. While O'Duffy was drawn into the conflict by traditionalist monarchists from Navarre, his leftist opponents in Ireland mounted a pro-republic propaganda campaign focused on the war effort of the rival Basque nationalists. In effect, a civil war between Basques became entangled with the legacy of the Irish Civil War, as old rivals such as O'Duffy and Gilmore constructed alliances on opposite sides of the conflict as it played out in this small corner of Spain. This article places a new emphasis on the Basque dimension of Ireland's engagement with the Spanish Civil War and illustrates how it was shaped by earlier Basque-Irish relations.

In twentieth-century Irish folklore, luck had much to do with women. While women were rarely seen as legitimate possessors of good fortune, luck was frequently perceived as being communicated through women's bodies and lost as a result of their actions. A caul, an intact amniotic membrane over a newborn's head and by-product of a pregnant woman's body, was believed to convey luck and health to either the mother or the child but not to both. The emphasis in this tradition on women's corporeality cast women and their maternal by-products as appropriable familial and communal resources. This and additional lore reveal that women were constructed as dangerous, ‘object-like others’ whose mere presence could threaten men's safety. Twentieth-century Ireland's folk and political cultures each operated within frameworks of supporting ideological systems. Despite being easily distinguishable in articulation, these cultures were frequently in concert with one another, especially relating to prescriptive gender roles. In numerous instances, lore about luck bolstered legislative, social and religious policies of the Irish Free State and the early Irish Republic regarding women. However, narrow divergences allowed women limited space to contest gender hierarchy in folk communities. Some women found opportunities for subversion in the very cultural fabric that restricted them, resorting to imaginative resistance to reject and counter misogynist discourse and assert female subjectivity.

It is rare that a book's dedication is quite so apposite to its theme as Maria Luddy and Mary O'Dowd's in their new history of marriage, which reads: ‘For Mary Cullen and Margaret MacCurtain who began it all.’ Indeed, they did, and this tour de force is a fitting testament to the significance of that women's history project started in the 1970s, which has ‘paved the way for all of us who engage with Irish gender history’ (p. xiii). Luddy and O'Dowd, both pioneers in the field in their own right, set themselves the not inconsiderable task of producing ‘an extended study of the history of heterosexual marriage on the island of Ireland from 1660–1925’ (p. 1). The result is a rich, colourful, at times playful, but also often depressing, five-hundred-and-fifty-page study of the most popular sexual bond between men and women in history — marriage. Indeed, that complex institution was obviously on the historical mind because Diane Urquhart's erudite study of Irish divorce from 1800 to 1997 and Sonja Tiernan's deftly navigated history of the marriage equality campaign in Ireland were also published in 2020.