Since the English Reformation, occasional days of thanksgiving, prayer and fasting were appointed by royal authority in response to an array of exceptional circumstances varying from outbreaks of disease to bad weather, and popish conspiracies to military successes. Details of these days of religious observance, their inspiration and purpose were communicated to the public by printed proclamation and reinforced by the publication of specially prepared forms of prayer for use in Anglican services on these occasions. The reign of William III (1689–1702) saw these days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving take place with unprecedented frequency. For the most part, this intensification of state-appointed public worship corresponded with the king's struggle against Louis XIV during the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97). Such days of occasional fasting and thanksgiving provided an opportunity for the Williamite court to promote the legitimacy of the new regime as part of a larger strategy of ‘courtly reformation’.

The name of Sir William Gregory features in most modern accounts of Ireland in the nineteenth century. It is fair to say, however, that usually he is regarded as a ‘villain’. Gregory is very widely known as the author of a piece of legislation introduced as part of relief measures during the Famine which sought to limit aid to those with a quarter acre or under of land and which became known as the Gregory clause or the quarter acre clause. An article in the New York Times on 16 July 2002 about the dedication of an Irish famine memorial in New York described the 5 million-dollar monument as follows: ‘The quarter-acre size of the monument adheres to the infamous Gregory clause passed by the British parliament in 1847, which decreed that cottiers whose plots exceeded that size would not be eligible for relief. The cottage is roofless because many farmers tore the thatches off their homes to prove destitution and qualify for relief.’ Most modern academic accounts of the Famine have been very critical of Gregory. It is widely accepted that the purpose of the Gregory clause was to assist landlords to clear their estates of pauperised smallholders who were paying little or no rent. This measure has been seen by some as leading to mass evictions and causing the clearance of many small farmers and labourers throughout Ireland.

The idea of an ‘Irish empire’ has had enduring appeal. It was a rare source of pride promoted by politicians and churchmen during depressed periods in independent Ireland, particularly the 1950s, and the phrase provided an evocative title for at least one popular – and notably sanguine – version of the Irish diaspora's story as late as the turn of this century. In such contexts ‘Irish empire’ can appear simply a wry play on a far more commonly used and, if recent scholarship is to be taken into account, by no means unrelated term, ‘British empire’. Yet as many historians of the Irish abroad, the Irish Catholic Church, and Irish culture more generally have noted, the existence of a peculiarly Irish ‘spiritual empire’ was widely spoken of even as the island's ports were daily choked with emigrants. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness and persistence of the concept, invariably involving the perception of a special, God-given emigrants' ‘mission’ to spread the Catholic religion in whatever part of the world they settled, warrant a more searching analysis than historians in the above-mentioned categories have hitherto devoted to it.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, cycling in Ireland progressed from being a relatively exclusive pursuit, confined mainly to young, middleclass men, to a popular sport and pastime which appealed alike to young, middleaged and elderly members of the middle class, including large numbers of women. At the beginning of the 1880s, most Irish cyclists were young men who rode the high-wheeled ‘Ordinary’ or ‘Penny-farthing’ machine. The introduction of the more cumbersome, but easily mountable, tricycle meant that in the early to mid-1880s cycling became accessible to older or more timid men than those who braved the Ordinary machine, and many women also took to the roads on the tricycle. The pastime also received a boost later in the decade, with the invention of the chain-driven ‘safety’ bicycle in the mid-1880s. The safety bicycle did not render the Ordinary obsolete until after the development of the pneumatic tyre, by John Boyd Dunlop, in 1888. Once it became apparent in a number of cycling races in Ireland and England in 1889 and 1890 that the chain-driven and pneumatic-tyred safety bicycle was both quicker and easier to ride than the Ordinary bicycle, the latter's days were numbered. From 1890 onwards, bicycle dealers in both countries were inundated with requests for pneumatic-tyred safety bicycles, and in the course of the 1890s cycling was transformed into a popular, albeit still mainly middle-class activity, that appealed to both sexes.

The late Peter Hart's tentative yet provocative application of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the Irish revolution, especially as practised in Co. Cork, continues to arouse widespread indignation and incredulity. Two associated issues have dominated the debate: the influence of sectarian hatred on the conduct of the I.R.A., and the extent to which Protestants were actually forced out of their homes by intimidation or fear. Though a few historians have endorsed Hart's claim that a substantial number of Protestants were murdered or expelled because of their religion, most argue that such attacks were primarily motivated by political or economic rather than sectarian motives. Similar points have been made, from the revolutionary epoch onwards, by liberal Protestants as well as republican sympathisers, whose rejection of the ‘ethnic cleansing’ hypothesis has sometimes degenerated into vicious ad hominem attacks on Hart and his allies. The issue of motivation is notoriously resistant to historical analysis: all motives are mixed, some are deliberately concealed, and others are unconscious. Little would be gained by making yet another attempt to disentangle the often contradictory hopes, fears, resentments, and rationalisations underlying republican conduct in the revolutionary years.

Between 13 and 15 August 1969 communal violence in Belfast saw seven people killed and over 400 treated for injuries. Nearly 2,000 families were forced from their homes. British troops were deployed on the streets to prevent further violence, events usually seen as the starting point of the modern Irish Troubles. In 1972 the Sunday Times Insight Team's Ulster set the tone for commentary on the role of the I.R.A. during this period. It claimed that the organisation had been ‘largely an irrelevance’ in Belfast during August 1969 and as a result ‘I.R.A. – I Ran Away was scrawled derisively over the walls of the Catholic Ghettos’. Conor Cruise O'Brien soon asserted in States of Ireland that when violence erupted ‘the I.R.A. had very few weapons and very few people trained and ready to use them. Their prestige in the Ghettos went sharply down. People wrote on walls I.R.A. I Ran Away.’ Echoing these statements twentythree years later Tim Pat Coogan in his book The Troubles stated that ‘the I.R.A. posed very little threat to anyone during those days. So little that the disgusted inhabitants of the area, used to regarding the I.R.A. in the traditional role of “the defenders” wrote up the letters I.R.A. on gable walls as Irish Ran Away.' Similar assertions are found in a wide variety of the literature, both popular and academic, dealing with the outbreak of the Troubles.