Relief was the dominant response of northern loyalists and Orangemen to the tripartite agreement of December 1925, which confirmed the border as defined in 1920. A year later, when the Prime Minister visited Newry to preside over the Grand Orange Lodge of County Down, he and ‘Lady Craig were made the recipients of very handsome presents from the Loyalists and Orangemen of Newry and District in recognition of valuable services in connection with the settlement of the Boundary question’. The agreement promised to end fourteen years of uncertainty, during which the frontier of loyal Ireland had contracted to a point where it seemed barely defensible. Under relentless pressure from successive governments as well as nationalists, the opponents of Irish self-government had effectively abandoned hope for the three southern provinces in 1911, and for the three Ulster counties with large Catholic majorities in 1916. The survival of the Irish Free State remained in doubt until 1923, and the incredibly vague terms for the proposed boundary commission created justifiable fear among loyalists that further attempts would be made to cripple the northern state by massive territorial transfers. Craig’s great success, apart from stifling the northern civil war in June 1922, was to hold the line of the six counties until Cosgrave’s government acknowledged the fait accompli.

John White was appointed chief surgeon to the First Fleet on 24 October 1786 and sailed with that fleet, aboard the Charlotte, on 13 May 1787 for Botany Bay on the eastern seaboard of New Holland (Australia) where a penal colony was to be established. Between 18 and 20 January 1788 the entire fleet arrived at its destination and thus began the settlement of Australia by Europeans. White served as surgeon-general of the new colony, New South Wales, for almost six years until 17 December 1794 when he sailed on the Daedalus for Europe, never to return to Australia.

There goes the man who killed the home rule bill.’ Few will question the truth of this comment on Joseph Chamberlain. Yet the man who so vigorously opposed the home rule bill had from the very beginning of the second Gladstone administration, in which he held the comparatively junior office of president of the board of trade, been one of the members of the cabinet most anxious to consider Irish needs and opinion. He had criticized Forster’s coercion policy and had pressed for remedial legislation. He had acted as the link between the cabinet and the negotiators of the ‘Kilmainham treaty’. For a brief period he had been conspicuous for the relative closeness of his relations with Parnell and other leading Irish nationalists. ‘ I have spoken freely and openly to him [Parnell] and to many other Irish members, since Mr Forster ceased to be Irish secretary,’ he wrote to Gladstone on 7 June 1882, after his attention had been called to newspaper comments on the fact that he had been observed in conversation with Parnell in a lobby of the house of commons the day previously. At the end of 1884 and in 1885 he had engaged in negotiations with Parnell with a view to the establishment in Ireland of what later came to be known as a ‘national council’, but at the time was usually termed a ‘central board’.

On 7 August 1837, the first day of voting in an election for two county seats, there was an altercation on the steps of the courthouse in Carlow town. This was not a typical Irish election riot, however, although large numbers of excited supporters of the rival candidates were milling around in the streets adjacent to the building. The altercation, which involved shouted abuse and a physical struggle, took place between two men only: one was the town’s sub-inspector of constabulary, and the other was its resident magistrate (R.M.) — in other words, Carlow’s two principal government-appointed upholders of law and order. The resulting scandal was to have significant implications. It led to a great deal of heated correspondence with Dublin Castle, more than one constabulary inquiry, several court cases, and many questions before a subsequent select committee, to say nothing of numerous petitions, newspaper articles and pamphlets; but, most important, it ultimately precipitated the resignation of Colonel James Shaw Kennedy, the first inspector-general of the Irish Constabulary. This article will attempt to explain why an apparently minor scuffle in Carlow town created a crisis in Irish policing in the late 1830s.

The eulogy on King William I of England in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle includes the interesting assertion that William would have conquered Ireland without weapons had he lived another year or two. Some commentators, such as Sir Frank Stenton, considered it to be merely a testimony to the victorious reputation of the Conqueror. Others have suggested that the chronicler had erred with regard to direction, and Denis Bethell speculated that there was slightly more reason to believe William was contemplating an expedition to Galicia during the last years of his life. Marjorie Chibnall pointed out, however, that there must have been some reason for such a statement. A possible explanation does appear when examining the relations between England and Ireland during the reign of William, and a suggestion can be made that political affairs in Ireland influenced, to some extent, the planning of the Conqueror. There are reasons for believing that, in order to diminish the peril from the west, William deliberately promoted good relations with one particular Irish prince — Toirrdelbach ua Briain, king of Munster and claimant to the high-kingship of Ireland.

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.

This article investigates the antiquarian response to the opportunity for Irish Catholic relief during the Anglo–American crisis and views Sylvester O’Halloran’s General history as an innovative attempt to initiate Irish Catholic participation in the British empire predicated on a historic and current fittingness. The London publication of the General history indicated that this work was directed at an audience outside of, as well as within, Ireland. An investigation of the subscription-list confirms that that audience consisted of members of Britain’s political élite and successful émigré Irishmen in the service of European Catholic powers. The narrative analysis, when compared with its principal sources, Keating’s seventeenth-century Foras feasa ar Éirinn and the twelfth-century Lebor gabála Érenn, shows that O’Halloran altered his source materials to construct an historical picture of a Milesian maritime empire. O’Halloran’s argument for Catholic inclusion in the British empire was twofold. He altered his source material to suggest an ancient parity with the contemporary British empire to demonstrate an Irish historical fittingness for an imperial role, while his subscription-list confirmed a current aptitude. This argument was directed at and partly endorsed by another section of the subscription-list, London’s political élite.

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.

In November 1660 the newly restored king published a declaration for the settlement of Ireland. The substance of this document was that the ‘adventurers’ of the 1640s and the Cromwellian soldiers were to keep what they had got; the Irish Protestants who had actively supported the royalist cause (especially between 1648 and 1650) and who had not yet obtained compensation for this service were to receive their arrears of pay; Irish Catholics who had been deprived of their lands merely on the grounds of their religion were to be restored to what they had lost. From the clash of these interest groups came the moulding forces behind what is known as the ‘Restoration settlement’. (That settlement was based on two acts: the Act of Settlement, 1663, and the Act of Explanation, 1666. The former set out who were to receive lands and where; the latter explained and clarified the many conflicting clauses in the former.)

Traditional accounts of the establishment of the 36th (Ulster) Division in October 1914 suggest that this unit was formed purely from the pre-war U.V.F. Writing in 1922, Cyril Falls (himself an officer in both the U.V.F. and the 36th Division) declared:

Modern historians have echoed this view. Tom Johnstone, for example, has noted that ‘the battalions of the (36th) Division, based on the Ulster Volunteer Force (U.V.F.) order of battle, had been in existence since before the war’. Meanwhile Philip Orr has even suggested that the 36th Division was a ‘covenanting army’, all its members supposedly having signed the Ulster Covenant opposing home rule. In this article the validity of these claims will be considered, particularly with regard to the continuity in personnel and equipment between the U.V.F. and the 36th Division and the military efficiency that the formation had achieved by the time it arrived on the Western Front.

This article responds to ‘An agenda for women's history in Ireland, 1500–1900’ by highlighting the explanatory potential of the Presbyterian archive in extending and reshaping our understanding of women, gender and the family in Ireland. Discussed here as the ‘Presbyterian archive’, the records of the Presbyterian church offer a tantalising insight into the intimate worlds of women and men in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. Although Presbyterians were a minority religious community in Ireland, their records provide much more than a marginalised picture. Instead, the Presbyterian archive casts fresh light on the wider Irish evidence, enriching our knowledge of the everyday lives of women and men in Ireland. The article begins by introducing the Presbyterian archive and the community responsible for its creation. Next, it considers how the Presbyterian archive both meets and advances the aims of the ‘Agenda’ and reveals what it can tell us about the lives of women and men as gendered subjects. Overall, the article underlines the importance of the Presbyterian archive as a source for Irish historians because it underscores why all history is gender history.

Drawing on the recent scholarly interest in ‘generationism’ and the revolutionary period, this article examines the life chances of the 247 children born to the last cohort of Irish Parliamentary Party M.P.s elected to Westminster between 1910 and 1918. It employs a prosopographical approach to reconstruct their lives at specific points (1910 and 1948) in order to assess the impact that independence had on their fortunes longitudinally. While it problematises the idea that the Edwardian children of nationalist M.P.s formed part of a privileged elite in waiting, it does conclude that they enjoyed a degree of cultural and political capital that positioned them advantageously in advance of home rule. The analysis advanced here suggests that despite experiencing some political disorientation, those scions of the old I.P.P. who lived through the revolutionary years reoriented themselves relatively quickly, regrouped, and experienced considerable political and professional success during the following decades. As for those children who were born or achieved adulthood after 1922, there is little evidence to suggest that they were socially or politically ostracised, or that, in turn, they felt a sense of fundamental alienation from the new state. Ultimately, unlike those who had fought for the republic but ended up feeling as if they were among the losers, what the children of the I.P.P lost after 1918 should not obscure the fact that many of them were among the winners in the new Ireland.

One dispute in Irish history which has not been given the attention it deserves is that which involved Britain, Ireland and Portugal during the years 1780-87 Authors of outline Irish histories, Lecky, Murray, George O’Brien and McDowell only mention the dispute briefly in their respective narratives, though it is clear they understood its importance to some degree at least. Maurice O’Connell, who has produced the only specialist study for the period in question, makes no reference to the dispute at all. This dispute has indeed been more substantially treated by the British historian, John Ehrman, within the general context of an analysis of the British government’s commercial negotiations from 1783 to 1793. However, the perspective he draws relates purely to Britain and Portugal, which, in itself, narrows the true significance of an episode which was important in that it completely undermined the benefits Ireland hoped to accrue from the free-trade legislation of 1779-80, and also because it raised a number of interesting questions relative to Ireland’s constitutional status vis-à-vis of Great Britain.

History has an attraction for the amateur as well as for the professional, and though the attraction may be of a similar kind, the amateur is rarely given access to primary sources. Yet it is from these that history is written and fundamentally experienced. Giraldus Gambrensis (1146-1223) wrote about Ireland and his native Wales in the late twelfth century in such a fashion that his works can be read with pleasure, profit and, if correctly presented, understanding by both amateur and professional. Most of his works have been available to professional historians for a century in the edition published in the Rolls Series; the rest of his works have been edited since then. Yet surprisingly, rather little use was made of them until very recently. Only over the past decade has the work of this colourful and controversial individual attracted more than passing attention.

In the general election of January 1906, R. G. Glendinning, a taciturn baptist linen manufacturer of Belfast, won the North Antrim parliamentary seat. The significance of this event was his success in an overwhelmingly protestant constituency at the expense of the highly articulate and intelligent unionist sitting member, William Moore, the principal architect of the Ulster Unionist Council and the leader of the unionist campaign to expose the devolutionary dangers of ‘Macdonnellism’. Furthermore Glendinning had campaigned as a ‘liberal unionist’, but had been condemned as a home ruler by his opponent and indeed upon arrival in the house of commons took his seat on the liberal government benches. Some years later, in 1913, despite the heightened political temperature, it was still possible for a meeting on 24 October in Ballymoney town hall attended by some four or five hundred protestants to denounce ‘the lawless policy of Carsonism’, and for this same meeting to be addressed by such noted nationalists as Captain Jack White, Sir Roger Casement and Mrs Alice Stopford Green. Their audience was invited to sign an anti-covenant devised by White and closely modelled on, though directly opposed to, the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant. As late as 1925 an independent protestant candidate, George Henderson, representing the Unbought Tenants Association, secured one of the seven County Antrim seats in the Northern Ireland parliament, thus preventing the election of an official unionist, R. D. Megaw. Then there is the interesting phenomenon of the Independent Orange Order which in the years before 1914 had established itself more firmly in north Antrim than anywhere else. The area also threw up in this period a number of prominent individuals who became active in non-unionist politics, of whom the Reverend J. B. Armour, the Reverend D. D. Boyle, John Pinkerton and Samuel Craig McElroy are perhaps the best known. Finally Bally money and the Route was the epicentre of the Ulster tenant-right movement in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The current number of the Friends of the Library of Trinity College contains matter that is of interest to all who have seen or who hope to see the Book of Kells. Mr R. O. Dougan, who has recently been appointed deputy librarian, gives an account of the methods used by the English experts who have recently rebound the book in four parts. The decision to break so famous a book into four separate parts, corresponding with the four Gospels, was undoubtedly drastic, and has come as a shock to many lovers of ancient manuscripts. But Mr Dougan explains here at length the reasons which have compelled the College authorities to take this step; and his account of the methods used by Mr Roger Powell in the process of restoration and rebinding is impressive as a witness to the care which has been taken to safeguard this national treasure for future generations. Tourists who visit the library will perhaps be disappointed : for the old custom of constantly exhibiting some of the finer pages will be discontinued. Each page of each volume will now be exhibited in turn, and the great illuminated pages will be less frequently exposed to the tourist's gaze. On the other hand, this means that no more than a fourth part of the book will be in the exhibition case at any one time; and serious students will always have an opportunity of examining all four parts at their leisure.

Despite the unprecedented interest shown by historians in Ireland and empire in recent years, comparatively little research has focused on Northern Ireland’s connections to the British Empire-Commonwealth in the post-partition decades. This article utilises some new sources to throw light on both the centrifugal and centripetal aspects of the imperial relationship. The discussion begins with the imperial significance of visits to Northern Ireland by statesmen such as William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, to his native Ulster in 1923, and that of Gordon Coates, also Prime Minister of New Zealand, three years later. At the end of the period, the visit of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker to both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland can add to our knowledge about the changing relationship between Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth.

On 4 September 1607 the two Ulster earls, Tyrone and Tyrconnell, and the lord of Fermanagh, Cuconnaught Maguire, accompanied by their respective kinsmen, embarked from Lough Swilly for continental Europe. They never again returned to the lands they had striven so hard to hold. Their departure was a tragedy for Gaelic Ireland; their former dependants were left leaderless and unprotected, and what remained of the Gaelic way of life was soon undermined by the plantation in Ulster. The ‘ flight of the earls ’ is one of the black pages of Irish history and the event marks the end of an age.

What occasioned this sudden and mysterious departure? Of the many answers suggested almost all have been coloured by prejudice and the picture, consequently, remains clouded. Professional historians, with few exceptions, have shied away from the subject, and have contented themselves with qualified versions of the explanations offered by such writers as Fr Meehan, T. M. Healy, and Seán O'Faoláin. An essay in revision is certainly long overdue.