The great tradition of the Buachailli Bána in the south of Ireland had its small beginnings on the Tipperary side of the Knockmealdown mountains during the closing months of 1761. ‘ Their first rise was in October last,’ a Youghal gentleman told his son in London in April 1762, ‘ and they have ever since been increasing;… they always assembled in the night with their shirts over their clothes, which caused them to be called Whiteboys. ’ The exactions of tithe-farmers and the enclosure of commonage sparked the initial oath-bound combination in the district between Clogheen and Ballyporeen. A recently installed tithe-farmer named Dobbyn, who kept an inn at Ballyporeen, issued the novel demand that local catholic couples pay him a fee of 5s. when they married before a priest. Among those who vehemently denounced this new tax was Fr Nicholas Sheehy, the outspoken, socially committed young parish priest of Shanrahan; Fr Sheehy had already attracted the disapproving notice of local protestant ministers and magistrates by opposing the collection of church rates when he was stationed in the parish of Newcastle, and by proclaiming the excommunication of the inhabitants of the town of Mitchelstown and the parish of Brigown Fant, who was later convicted of riot and trespass and sentenced to a fine of £50 and two years in prison, seemed a rather pathetic and improbable leader of an agrarian movement. But the action of the crowd he had harangued at Kilmallock proved contagious. From there the disturbances spread northwards to the districts of Bruff, Hospital, and Caherconlish. Bodies of Levellers, collected by the blowing of horns, mobilised ‘ in great numbers ’ and fired guns as they marched along in their white shirts, ‘ demolishing in the night time the fences of the inclosures ’ of many persons and ‘ swearing fidelity to each other and secrecy ’.

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.

In 1939, in his book Ulster and the British empire, Henry Harrison described partition as ‘a word of evil omen. . . It implies something resembling the surgical division of a living organism—a lopping off of limbs’. A writer on the partition of Ireland, Dr Denis Gwynn, condemned it as ‘so illogical, and so harmful in its results, that it cannot continue indefinitely’, and hinted that the imperial parliament ‘which devised and imposed the present partition’ should use ‘its influence and its authority to promote agreement’. This paper, however, makes no attempt to judge the morality of what was done in 1920, nor does it suggest a means of its undoing. It examines the attitude of British conservatives to what was known as the ‘Ulster question’ at three critical phases between 1912 and 1921, with special reference to the period after 1916, it deals with Anglo-Irish relations only as they affect this theme; and it attempts to show that, as far as British conservative opinion was concerned, the fate of Ulster, or of any part of Ulster, was always secondary to what were regarded as the interests of England and of the British empire.

The most remarkable aspect of Ireland’s aberrant history in the later nineteenth century is surely the disappearance of nearly half her population. This was largely due not to heavy mortality during the Great Famine, but to massive emigration. Of few enough Irish families might it be said, in the words of the Vicar of Wakefield, that all their adventures were by the fire-side, and all their migrations from the blue bed to the brown. For both Irishmen and Irishwomen emigration became an expected episode in the life-cycle, akin to marriage or inheritance. Thus for the generation entering the employment market in about 1876, when the pace of post-Famine flight had already slackened, the probability of eventual emigration was still almost one-half. For those of either sex remaining in Ireland, the chance of marriage was only three in four For earlier generations, particularly of those brought up in the south-west, the likelihood of emigration had reached the extraordinary level of two in three.

It is a commonplace of recent British historiography that in the early modern period a sophisticated and sceptical concept of writing history began to develop which involved, among other things, historians becoming significantly less credulous in their use of sources. Often the crucial break with medieval ‘chronicles’ is seen to have been brought about by the triumph of the exiled Italian humanist, Polydore Vergil, over the fervently nationalistic band of British historians and antiquarians led by John Leland, establishing that the Arthurian legends were no more than an origin myth. Jack Scarisbrick, for example, has argued that ‘early Tudor England did not produce a sudden renewal of Arthurianism … As the sixteenth century wore on, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s patriotic fantasies received increasingly short shrift from reputable historians.’ However, this comforting narrative of increasingly thorough and careful scholarship ignores the fact that there was a form of history writing in which the reliance upon origin myths such as the Arthurian legends and the ‘matter of Britain’ actually increased dramatically after the Reformation, namely English histories of Ireland.

In the history of the modern world, it is well known that the British Isles have exercised an influence entirely disproportionate to their size. In the history of modern police, Ireland’s contributions are little known. The time is long overdue to recognize the importance of this small island in the development of police in the British archipelago and beyond.

Erskine Childers has commonly been seen as the éminence grise of hardline republicanism in the negotiations for an Anglo-Irish treaty that took place in London between October and December 1921. Lloyd George described him as ‘rigid and fanatical’ and believed that Childers had attempted to ‘wreck every endeavour to reach agreement’ Thomas Jones saw Childers as an ‘intense republican’, and it is clear that Jones, too, regarded Childers as an obstacle to an agreed solution. Childers has been portrayed as an inflexible wrangler who stood in the way of an agreement in the winter of 1921 and who was fundamentally opposed to the more conciliatory views of Arthur Griffith, in particular, and of Michael Collins. In Peace by ordeal Lord Longford has stressed the gulf that lay between Childers and Griffith and the way in which this contributed to a division in the Irish dele-g ation as a whole. On one side were the delegates who were more prepared to compromise and reach a settlement with the British negotiators; on the other were those, backed by Childers, who held out against concessions and who signed the treaty on 6 December only with the greatest reluctance.

The character of modern Ireland after partition has long been the subject of debate, by columnists, poets, novelists and historians. John Whyte’s outstanding study of the process by which what he called the ‘Catholic moral code’ became enshrined in the ‘law of the state’ summarised the ‘remarkable consensus’ achieved in the years 1923-37, a time when there was ‘overwhelming agreement that traditional Catholic values should be maintained, if necessary by legislation’. Based on personal reminiscences and published documents, Whyte’s contribution is of enduring value to those seeking to understand the culture of modern Ireland. His account is even more impressive when read against the background of materials which have more recently become available in the National Archives. These enable some of the detail to be filled in, but they also provoke some new questions about the state of the country and the means by which a peaceable Ireland was to be constructed in the aftermath of a war of independence and a civil war.

Nineteenth century industrialism brought intensified immigration to the cities of England. E. P. Thomson, in The making of the English working class, generalized on one segment of the new urban population, the Irish :

On Wednesday 24 March 1847 a national day of fast and humiliation was observed throughout the United Kingdom, imploring, in the words of the royal proclamation, ‘the removal of those heavy judgments which our manifold sins and provocations have most justly deserved’. The fast-day was marked by a general stoppage of work and the opening of places of worship for special services. Substantial collections for the relief of famine distress in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands were made at church and chapel doors as the congregations retired. The effect was, as one Hampshire clergyman observed, dramatic: ‘The whole nation has this day lamented their sins and prayed for pardon; imagination can scarcely picture a more affecting scene than that of millions of people, assembled at the same moment in the presence of the Almighty, imploring his forgiveness, praying for grace to amend their lives, and deprecating the continuance of his displeasure.’

What was the meaning of this seemingly archaic reaction to the Irish Famine? Considered through the filter of late twentieth-century religious scepticism, it might appear at best a marginal distraction from the catastrophic drama of the Famine, at worst a cynical attempt by the political establishment to lay a moral smokescreen around the question of responsibility for famine relief by reviving pre-modern conceptions of divine agency. To understand the significance of the fast-day and its repercussions, however, it is necessary to recognise the extent to which a Christian — and more particularly a Protestant evangelical — world-view permeated early Victorian British society.

Writing some years after the events he was describing, Michael Cusack, the first secretary of the Gaelic Athletic Association, suggested that in its early years the ‘Association swept the country like a prairie fire’. This is perhaps a little exaggerated, but its success was striking. Eighteen months after its foundation the G.A.A. was reckoned to have 50,000 individual members. Six months later there were around 400 affiliated clubs. The relative success of the G.A.A. is particularly apparent when its progress is compared with that of two of its rival organisations. The Irish Football Association was founded in 1880. Ten years later only 124 clubs had affiliated to it. By the same date the G.A.A., founded in 1884, had 875 member clubs.

It has long become commonplace to observe that the act of union of 1800, which abolished the Irish parliament and established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, has since its enactment exerted a formative influence on Irish history and remained the dominant issue in Anglo-Irish relations. In view of this, it is surprising that so little notice has been afforded the development of unionist sentiment in Britain and Ireland in the century and a half to 1800, and that the origins of and background to the union have received such cursory attention. There is, of course, an obvious historical and historiographical reason for this. Generations of Irish nationalists, and all too frequently their historians, have perceived the union as a malign termination of the constitutional arrangement known grandly but misleadingly as Grattan’s parliament and, consequently, have been little interested in investigating or understanding its origins.

The 1930s were years of political turmoil and economic crisis and change in Ireland. Economic activity had peaked in 1929, and the last years of the Cumann na nGaedheal government (in power since the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922) saw substantial drops in output, trade and employment. The policies pursued after Fianna Fáil’s victory in the election of February 1932 were therefore influenced both by immediate economic pressures and by the party’s ideological commitments. The highly protectionist measures associated with de Valera and Lemass — key men of the new régime — sought both to create jobs quickly and to build more gradually a large indigenous industrial sector, producing primarily for the home market.

Political controversy complicated matters. De Valera was regarded as a headstrong fanatic by the British establishment. His government’s refusal to hand over to Britain the so-called ‘land annuities’ — a disputed item in the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921 — led to an ‘economic war’, in which the British Treasury sought payment instead through penal ‘emergency’ tariffs on Irish imports. The Irish imposed their own duties, bounties and licensing restrictions in turn. The economic war hurt Irish agriculture badly; the prices of fat and store cattle dropped by almost half between 1932 and mid-1935. Farmers got some relief through export bounties and the coal-cattle pacts (quota exchanges of Irish cattle for British coal) of 1935-7, but Anglo-Irish relations were not normalised again until the finance and trade agreements of the spring of 1938, and the resolution of the annuities dispute did not mean an end to protection. The questions ‘Who won the economic war?’ and ‘What was the impact of protection on the Irish economy?’ are analytically distinct, but they are not that easy to keep apart in practice.

It has long been accepted that memory plays a prominent role in the construction of Irish identities and yet historians of Ireland were relatively late in addressing the vogue for memory studies that emerged in the 1980s. Its arrival as a core theme in Irish historical studies was announced in 2001 with the publication of History and memory in modern Ireland, edited by Ian McBride, whose seminal introduction essay – the essential starting point for all subsequent explorations – issued the promise that ‘a social and cultural history of remembering would unravel the various strands of commemorative tradition which have formed our consciousness of the past’. The volume originated in one of the many academic conferences held in the bicentennial year of the 1798 rebellion, which was part of a decade of commemorations that listed among its highlights the tercentenary of the battle of the Boyne, the sesquicentenary of the Great Famine, and the bicentenaries of the United Irishmen, the Act of Union, and Robert Emmet’s rising. The following years produced a boom of studies on Irish memory, which has anticipated another decade of commemorations. Eyes are now set on the centenaries of the Great War, the Irish Revolution and Partition, all of which will undoubtedly generate further publications on memory. It is therefore timely to take stock of this burgeoning field and consider its future prospects.

In the proclamation that was issued on Easter Monday 1916 the provisional government of the Irish Republic undertook to grant ‘equal rights and opportunities to all its citizens’ and to ‘cherish all the children of the nation equally’. It also emphasised that the Republic was ‘oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from a majority in the past’ and referred to the support given to the Republic ‘by her exiled children in America’. The belief that the Irish nation included all inhabitants of the island was a central tenet of Irish nationalism both before and after 1922, and the numerous visits that nationalist leaders have paid to the United States from the time of Parnell and Davitt to the present testify to the importance that has been attached to the Irish overseas. In November 1948, while introducing the second reading of the Republic of Ireland Bill, the Taoiseach, John A. Costello, noted that ‘The Irish at home are only one section of a great race which has spread itself throughout the world, particularly in the great countries of North America and the Pacific.’

It is seldom possible to date accurately the beginning or end of population movements. It is doubtful whether the migration of Irish harvesters to Great Britain was very extensive before the end of the eighteenth century. At the close of the century, however, conditions were such as to render the migration desirable to the English farmers, and a necessity to the Irish peasant. By 1827 so desperate was the situation of the latter that a witness could declare before a parliamentary committee on emigration, that ‘ every decrease in the number coming to England each year would add to the probability of starvation in Ireland ’. The year 1838 has been taken as the closing date of this study since it saw the introduction of the first remedial effort (the Irish poor law act).

The Society of United Irishmen, formed in the autumn of 1791 as a middle-class club dedicated to achieving parliamentary reform and catholic emancipation, was eventually transformed into a mass-based, secret revolutionary organisation determined to establish a non-sectarian republic in Ireland. Approaching near extinction in 1794, the United Irishmen recovered within the next two years to become a formidable revolutionary threat. With amazing rapidity the United Irishmen managed to harness a politically-discontented middle class, radical artisans and tradesmen, economically and socially vexed peasants, amfa loose association of catholic agrarian rebels commonly known as Defenders into a more or less coherent force. The swiftness with which this” alliance was formed, burdened as it was with tensions along class and sectarian lines, was matched only by the quickness with which it collapsed under the strain of internal dissension and vigorous government repression.

There is general acceptance in recent writings that fenianism in its heyday — which is to say the middle 1860s — was espoused predominantly by members of lower-ranking social and occupational groups. It is not difficult to assemble supporting references and texts from well-placed contemporary observers. T.D.Sullivan writing privately to Thomas D’Arcy McGee in 1862 described the active but still anonymous organisation subsequently known as the ‘I.R.B.’ or the ‘feninas’ as drawing the bulk of its membership from among ‘shopkeepers’ assistants in our cities and chief towns who have a little smattering — often a very little indeed — of education’, and from ‘the very poorest and most ignorant people’ By 1865 the term ‘fenianism’ was in extensive use and the thing itself was receiving widespread attention. Writing his diary for 26 June that year, W J. O’Neill Daunt expressed the opinion that in his part of County Cork those implicated in fenian activities were ‘country lads’ and ‘town shop-boys’ At the same time, the mounting pile of constabulary reports from around the country provided more and more references to the infection of specific categories by fenianism: in one area, shopboys, artisans, servants and reduced farmers; in another, ‘young men of the labouring class and also mechanics or tradesmen such as tailors, nailors, shoemakers’; elsewhere, subordinate employees on the railway Less specifically, an alarmed detective visiting the Thurles area reported that the ‘lower orders’ thereabouts were fenians virtually to a man.

The risings in Ulster in late October 1641 marked the climax of one of those key periods in Anglo-Irish history in which events in Ireland had a direct and crucial impact upon the course of events in England. For at least a year prior to the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion, there had been a complex interaction of English and Irish events which, to a significant extent, conditioned the English response to the news of the risings. Not only was thc Irish rebellion of central importance in helping to precipitate the armed confrontation of king and parliament, and in reinforcing party alignment, but sharp memories of the rebellion inay also have made some contribution to the final collapse of royalist fortunes. The great significancc of the 1641 rebellion in the escalation into civil war in England was recalled by Richard Baxter in his autobiography.

Much more so than in modern times, sharp cultural and social differences distinguished the various peoples inhabiting the British Isles in the later middle ages. Not surprisingly these differences and the interaction between medieval forms of culture and society have attracted considerable attention by historians. By comparison with other fields of research, we know much about the impact of the Westminster government on the various regions of the English polity, about the interaction between highland and lowland Scotland and about the similarities and differences between English and Gaelic Ireland. Yet the historical coverage of these questions has been uneven, and what at first glance might appear obvious and promising lines of inquiry have been largely neglected — for example the relationship between Gaelic Ireland and Gaelic Scotland, or between Wales, the north of England and the lordship of Ireland as borderlands of the English polity. No doubt the nature and extent of the surviving evidence is an important factor in explaining this unevenness, but in fact studies of interaction between different cultures seem to reflect not so much their intrinsic importance for our understanding of different late medieval societies as their perceived significance for the future development of movements culminating in the present.