The repeated use of special legislation to suppress popular disorder in Ireland and the failure to provide any permanent remedy has been a recurrent theme of Irish history. Introducing the Catholic relief bill in 1829, Robert Peel stressed the ‘melancholy fact’ that ‘for scarcely one year, during the period that has elapsed since the Union, has Ireland been governed by the ordinary course of the law’. Catholic emancipation proved no more of a panacea than the Union before it. Ireland, as J.L. Hammond once observed, was ruled under the ordinary law for only five years of the first half of the nineteenth century. Approaching the subject from a slightly different angle, Samuel Clark tells us that governments passed or renewed thirty-five coercion acts between the Union and the Famine. But although this state of affairs has occasioned much comment from historians it has been subjected to little systematic analysis. There has, for example, been no attempt to emulate for the earlier part of the century Townshend’s examination of British policy in response to political violence after 1848. Such a project cannot be attempted in a single article but it is hoped that a brief survey of repressive legislation in the years from 1821 to 1841, and a more detailed look at that aimed at agrarian disturbances will help to fill this historical lacuna.

During the imperial conference of 1930 a senior British official vented his exasperation at the demands of the Irish delegation, commenting ‘surely de Valera could not be worse than this. If their opponents came into power, this might clear the air. We might get rid of this sapping by which we are losing much and gaining little goodwill.’

In retrospect, as many British ministers and officials would have ruefully admitted, this view had much to commend it. But the peculiar circumstances surrounding Eamon de Valera’s accession to power, followed so soon by a major disturbance in Anglo-Irish relations, instead of clearing the air, fogged it with tension, rumour and misunderstanding. In such an atmosphere rational assessments of the new Irish leader and his policy were at a premium.

The early decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a substantial increase in the pace and scale of Irish emigration to Britain, a process which culminated in the massive Irish pauper influx of 1845-51 in the wake of the Irish famine. During this period the Irish-born population of England, Scotland and Wales rose from 415,000 in 1841 to 727,000 in 1851, reaching 805,000 in 1861, when it comprised 3.5 per cent of the population. Thereafter, the number of Irish-born declined to 653,000 in 1891, reviving only in the twentieth century. These figures do not, however, include the children of Irish immigrants born in Britain; thus the actual size of ethnic Irish communities was undoubtedly much higher than contemporary census returns suggest. Indeed, a survey of the Irish in Britain conducted in 1872 by the Nation, a Dublin weekly newspaper, argued that the number of Irish-born indicated in official statistics should be doubled in order to arrive at a more realistic enumeration of the ethnic Irish community in Britain.

In 1440, for the first and only time in the late middle ages, the Irish in England were treated as aliens for taxation purposes. At the Reading session of the parliament of 1439–40 the Commons had granted an alien subsidy. It was a poll tax, to be paid at the rate of 16d. per head by householders and at 6d. per head by non-householders, by all those either not born in England or Wales or who did not have letters of denization, that is, naturalisation. Men of religious obedience and children under the age of twelve were also exempted, as were alien women married to English or Welsh men. The grant was to last for three years, and the first assessments were to be made around Easter 1440 for a tax to be collected in two parts, at Easter and the following Michaelmas. Caught in the tax net were Gascons and Normans, Bretons and Flemings, Scots and Channel Islanders, French and Italians, Spanish and Portuguese, the occasional Icelander, Swede and Finn — and the Irish. Like all new taxes, it met with resistance, and pressure groups such as the Genoese and Hanseatic merchants were soon able to claim exemption by virtue of their charters. There were also protests from Ireland. The earl of Ormond, as head of the Dublin administration, pointed out to the king that this was something new and asked Henry VI that Englishmen born in Ireland should have the same rights and freedom as Englishmen born in England.

In the literature of the Irish independence movement the question of a federal settlement involving the United Kingdom, and possibly the whole empire, in a grand scheme of ‘devolution’ has received relatively little attention. However, the papers of Moreton Frewen (1853–1924), now lodged in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., should add a great deal to any assessment of this aspect of the Irish Problem.

Frewen was a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry with business interests in America. He married a daughter of Leonard Jerome of New York, and was therefore an uncle of both Winston Churchill and Shane Leslie, both of whom had mothers who were Jeromes. Furthermore, his brother’s daughter became the second wife of Sir Edward Carson, and in addition to these family associations he was acquainted with the most prominent men of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic. His life was actually a series of business and political failures, but his papers hold the key to a fascinating chapter in the search for a federal solution to Ireland’s political problems, and most of what follows is based upon those papers.

The feud between the Talbot and Ormond interests, which dominates Anglo-Irish history from about 1414 to 1447, is of interest chiefly as an illustration of the final stage in the collapse of a government, and as affording a striking instance of that parallelism which can often be observed between English and Anglo-Irish history. In both cases the period is marked by the relapse of politics into mere faction and the corresponding decline of the institutions of government in estimation and effectiveness. In Ireland this decline is even more marked than in England, lacking, as it does, the more cheerful colours of rapid commercial progress to lighten the dark picture of political decadence. In Ireland the feuds and factions of the early fifteenth century, connected with the personalities of Sir John Talbot and the fourth earl of Ormond, brought the government to such a pitch of disorder that by the beginning of the Tudor period thorough reorganization was necessary.

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.

Female activists across the United Kingdom had insisted from the late nineteenth century that the employment of women police who would deal with problems specific to women and children could help to address pressing social questions, or at least to offer women some protection within the entirely male criminal justice system. Their campaign for women police was connected to similar demands for the employment of female prison visitors and inspectors and, later, jurors and lawyers, and it was predicated on the idea that neither prisons nor courts afforded women fair and equal treatment under the law. Early victories included the appointment of police matrons and searchers, but the resistance of police authorities and most other civil servants to female officers remained solid into the early twentieth century, feminist campaigning notwithstanding. The outbreak of the First World War, however, provided an ideal context for renewed activism on the issue, not least because commentators across the British Isles predicted that the apparent inability of girls and young women to resist the lure of uniformed men would lead to outbreaks of war-induced sexual promiscuity and a decline in standards of public behaviour.

Chronic rural disturbances have featured prominently in the modern history of Ireland. In particular, the period from the 1760s to the 1830s witnessed frequent and widespread disturbances, ranging over several counties and lasting for years. The disturbers — contemporaries sometimes called them ‘Whiteboys’ — were often sworn into secret societies which operated at night under the command of a mythical leader, known variously as Captain Right, Captain Steel or Captain Rock. Historical scholarship has shed light on many of these disturbances. However, the Rockites in the south of Ireland in the early 1820s remain somewhat mysterious. Although this was the only instance of rural unrest in Munster in the early 1820s, the Rockite movement nonetheless constituted one of the most extensive and serious rural disturbances in Ireland before the Famine. Five regiments of troops were dispatched from Britain, ‘for the purpose of putting down actual, & most formidable Danger in Ireland’, as the home secretary admitted. The Insurrection Act, with its curfew at night and trial without jury, was introduced into eight counties, and in its first year the act brought to trial more than 1,500 men in Munster, of whom more than 200 were convicted and transported. In County Cork, where the movement was at its most formidable, open engagements between thousands of the Rockites and the military occurred in several places, while incendiarism prevailed to an extent unprecedented in the history of Irish agrarian disturbances. The special commissions appointed in February 1822, specifically to try Rockites in the county, convicted thirty-six men of capital crimes.

The act of 1704 ‘to prevent the further gronth of popery’ was, in Lecky's words, the most notorious of the penal laws. It was also the most comprehensive. It covered changes of religion, the purchase and inheritance of land, education, guardianship, employment, voting and pilgrimages. It was from the first regarded as an important and highly controversial measure. There was a great deal of argument about it, and its form changed remarkably during the protracted proceedings that took place before it passed into law. Catholics opposed it strenuously at various points in the legislative process. The introduction, at a late stage, of the sacramental test hit dissenters and produced further controversv. There were a number of unusual features in the treatment of the bill which repay investigation of the considerable volume of material relating to it. There are also gaps in the evidence which make it difficult to be certain about such questions as the attitude of the English government of the day to penal legislation in Ireland. It is particularly hard to determine why, and by whom, the sacramental test was introduced into the bill.

While the reigns of England's Angevin kings, Henry II, Richard I and John, have sparked centuries of historical interest, the verdicts rendered have been as diverse as the times that produced them. Increasingly, historians have come to highlight the abrasiveness of Angevin kingship in general when discussing the great calamities of John’s reign (including the loss of Normandy in 1204, Magna Carta, and the civil war of 1215–17), before recounting John’s unique depravity.

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.

Studies to date of the Dublin working class have tended to concentrate on the history of trade unionism and labour relations, examining the working class only insofar as this is relevant to the question of labour politics. Although the distinction between skilled and unskilled workers is generally noted, there is little detailed study of distinctions and similarities within the working class except on questions of wages, trade union membership and related issues such as workers’ benefits. The only disaggregation in terms of broader social characteristics occurs in studies relating to Ulster, where the distinctions and similarities between catholic and protestant households have been explored.

This paper analyses the Dublin working class in terms of religion, social background, birthplace, housing conditions and family structure. The major sources employed are the censuses of population, using both published and manuscript material and the registry of marriages. Before examining these however it is essential to sketch the city’s overall economic character.

Shortly before Michaelmas, 1587, when he was not yet fifteen years old, Aodh Ruadh Ó Domhnaill along with four companions went on board a vessel moored opposite Rathmullen in Lough Swilly, enticed mainly by the promise of wine. But the crew under one Nicholas Skipper of Dublin were decoys posing as merchants who, on instructions from Lord Deputy Sir John Perrot, brought the youths in captivity to Dublin. Aodh Ruadh and three of his companions were then lodged in prison in Dublin Castle. A first attempt at escape was made a little over three years later in January 1591 ending with O’Donnell’s prompt recapture, an event said to have caused widespread gloom among the Irish. But a second attempt a year later was successful. Aodh Ruadh returned to Ulster and, following a brief period of recuperation, was installed in the lordship of Tirconnell in the summer of 1592, in succession to his father who resigned in his favour A celebrated career ensued which was cut short by the defeat at Kinsale and his subsequent premature death at Simancas in September 1602.

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.

In 1963 the Second Vatican Council voted overwhelmingly to introduce the vernacular into Roman Catholic worship. The Irish hierarchy decided that both Irish and English speakers should be catered for in the reformed liturgy. Within a few years John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin, had gained a widespread reputation as having gone further than his fellow bishops in the provision of masses in Irish. At the same time he was criticised for his lack of enthusiasm towards other areas of liturgical reform. This dichotomy stemmed from McQuaid’s deep dismay at the church’s new ecumenical direction and the possibility that it would lead to shared worship between Catholics and Protestants. Yet, as a senior prelate in the Catholic Church, he was obliged to implement each of the Council’s decrees, including those concerning the liturgy. McQuaid’s response was to introduce Vatican-approved changes to the mass, while simultaneously protecting the traditional liturgy he cherished. So he tried to re-establish the Latin rite on the same terms as those he had arranged for the Irish mass. Had he succeeded, the result would have been a reduction in the use of an English vernacular which he found offensive to his Catholic sensibilities.

The last fifty years have witnessed the production of a large body of scholarship exploring the political and social history of the Irish Civil War and its aftermath. Debate has focused principally on the administrative abilities and democratic credentials of the Free State government and the extent to which revolutionary ideals were expressed institutionally following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. However, there has been strikingly little attempt to contextualise, rather than appraise, the lineage of the moral and ideological assumptions embedded in the executive council's public professions of political conviction, or to understand Treatyite policy-making on its own terms. In particular, historians have tended to weigh and measure the performance of the Cumann na nGaedheal government against anachronistic and moralising definitions of what the Irish revolution stood for at the expense of any systematic attempt to reconstruct the manner in which relevant historical actors understood this relationship. Focusing on the heterodox intellectual firmament of the Irish-Ireland movement, this paper demonstrates that the Cumann na nGaedheal government never abandoned the political languages of the revolution; rather, they constructed an ideology to support the new state rooted in their own interpretation of what they considered revolutionary ideals of Irish-Ireland nationalism.