Dorothy Macardle’s vast The Irish Republic first appeared in 1937, the year in which her inspiration and her patron de Valera unveiled Bunreacht na hÉireann, his own monument to pragmatic republicanism. Macardle, in Joseph Lee’s phrase the ‘hagiographer royal to the Irish Republic’, is rather out of fashion as a narrator of and commentator on the emergence of independent Ireland; it appears to be largely committed republicans and those who study them who now acknowledge and draw on her ‘classic’ work. The book itself is long out of print. Yet in its construction, its breadth of treatment, its declared ambition and its obvious subtexts, it stands apart both from militant republican writing of the period and from more formally dispassionate academic works. It is also a monument to the emergence of the ‘slightly constitutional’ politics of the first generation of Fianna Fáil, the party created by de Valera to bring the majority of republicans across the Rubicon from revolutionary to democratic politics. Finally, in its faithful and adoring exegesis of most of de Valera’s twists and turns during his tortuous progress from armed opponent to consolidator of the twenty-six-county state, it provides a possible historical template for laying aside the armed struggle which has contemporary resonances for a republican movement attempting to talk its way into a new form of non-violent politics in Northern Ireland without passing under the yoke of unequivocal decommissioning: in that context, a senior Irish official recently pointed somewhat wistfully to de Valera’s statement of 23 July 1923 (as reproduced by Macardle) that ‘the war, so far as we are concerned, is finished’ (p. 787).

In an earlier article in Irish Historical Studies the present author argued that the beginnings of the Irish Free State’s campaign against venereal disease were caught up in a politics of prostitution that mobilised nationalist, republican and post-colonial sentiments, revolving around the struggle between military and civilian authority, and invoking the moral arbitration of the Catholic church. Susannah Riordan’s recent response has clarified the administrative history of interdepartmental inquiries into the threat posed by venereal diseases, setting concerns over the role of prostitution in propagating disease within the context of the wider public health programme. She properly identifies inquiry references to ‘prophylaxis’ with chemical disinfection following exposure to infection, and rightly separates the report filed by Major Donal Carroll, the army’s chief sanitary officer, from that of Dr Robert Percy McDonnell, Medical Inspector of the Department of Local Government and Public Health.

The general outlines of the Norman settlement of Leinster were laid downin the time of Strongbow. At the time of the Norman invasion that part of Leinster which was to become Kildare was divided into four main tribal territories, described as cantreds under the Normans: Offelan in the north; Offaly to the north-west and centre; Omurethy in the south; and Leix to the south-west.

Offelan is now represented by the baronies of North and South Salt, Ikeathy and Oughterany, and Clane (formerly Otymy), which were granted to Adam de Hereford, who shared his grant with his brothers John and Richard; and North and South Naas, which were granted to Maurice Fitz Gerald, whose son, William, also divided his grant with his brother Gerald, the ancestor of the earls of Kildare.

These verses were written by the Irish poet to express his grief at the impact of the Williamite victory at the battle of the Boyne and all that followed for Ireland. They were chosen two hundred years later by the historian Edmund Curtis to make clear his attitude towards Ireland’s past. In 1923, just after home rule was secured for what was officially known as Saorstát Éireann (Irish Free State), he published his history of medieval Ireland, and where a dedication would normally be printed he inserted ‘The Absentee Lordship’ and followed it with these verses. In doing this, Curtis left no doubt that in his view medieval Ireland was a lordship wrongfully attached to the English crown and that it should rightfully have been a kingdom under its own native dynastic ruler. For this he was subsequently denounced as unhistorical, and to this day, especially in the view of the so-called revisionists, he is commonly regarded as not only out of date, but dangerous as well. It was argued that Curtis used the medieval past to justify the emergence of a self-governing state in Ireland. To quote just one example, Steven Ellis, the best of the medieval revisionists, wrote in 1987 that ‘historians like Edmund Curtis concentrated on such topics as friction between the Westminster and Dublin governments, the Gaelic revival, the Great Earl uncrowned king of Ireland, the blended race and the fifteenth-century home rule movement’.

Down to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.

In several respects the great famine revolutionized Irish overseas emigration. Numbers rose abruptly from an annual average of some 50,000 in the early ’forties to more than 100,000 in 1846, more than 200,000 in 1847 and an aggregate of well over one and a quarter millions in the six succeeding seasons. A relatively small, steady and considered emigration was replaced, especially during 1846-9, by a headlong outrush, sometimes more a hasty, even hysterical flight of economic refugees than a population movement as ordinarily understood. Unprecedented disasters overtook these emigrations, as epidemics swept over a passenger trade still painfully adjusting its shipping and standards to the new phenomenon and the growing predominance of Liverpool as the point of embarkation.

This article examines the Church of Ireland’s relationship with Scots Presbyterians after the Restoration, focusing on the churchmen’s regular complaints against the ‘disorderly’ practices of the Presbyterian communities in Ireland. The established church leaders spoke of the threat of political and social disorder from the Presbyterians, and they repeatedly targeted the spontaneous ex tempore prayer and preaching practised by Scottish ministers in order to illustrate their concerns. This article uncovers the theological roots of these apparently civic complaints to explain their ubiquity and vehemence. It argues that the churchmen feared that such uncontrolled, unscripted prayer could lead to blasphemy and provoke the wrath of God on the nation, thereby triggering war and unrest such as they had experienced in the preceding decades. In their view, there was little difference between holding to an improperly ordered church hierarchy and worship practice, and forcing this disorder on the state. By illustrating the links between theology, ecclesiology and the potential for political sedition as they were understood by Restoration churchmen, this article demonstrates the importance of theological nuance for clarifying the complex relationship between Ireland’s two largest Protestant denominations in the seventeenth century.

Paolo Giovio’s Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae et Orchadum presents several problems for the historian of early modern Ireland. Published in 1548, but composed for the most part during the early 1540s, it offered a comparatively detailed portrait of Irish geography, culture and politics to an international audience whose appetite for Irish affairs had been whetted by the recent Henrician Reformation. Yet the text offers scant commentary on Irish politics; its geographical information is often confused; its ethnography is evocative but rarely moralising; and its focus on Ulster and the lifestyle of Conn O’Neill is suggestive but tantalisingly so. The author’s sources are as obscure as his intentions. Nevertheless, Giovio’s text was still being read and cited by leading European and even Irish authors up to a hundred years later. It was a seminal treatment of Ireland and the Irish that found few parallels in international print-houses until the gradual emergence of the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis towards the end of the sixteenth century. This article sets the Descriptio in the twin context of early modern geographical humanism and the international fallout of the Henrician Reformation.

When members of the Irish Volunteers shot dead a policeman and burst into the yard of Dublin Castle on 24 April 1916, Sir Matthew Nathan, the under-secretary, and Major Ivon H. Price, the head of military intelligence in Ireland, were upstairs in Nathan’s office discussing whether or not known agitators should be deported under the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA). This somewhat ironic scenario, which raises questions about the state of British intelligence in Ireland, has proved very attractive to historians working on this period. Some, such as Leon Ó Broin in his classics Dublin Castle and the 1916 rising: the story of Sir Matthew Nathan (1966) and The chief secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (1969), have attempted to defend the actions of the civil government. Eunan O’Halpin, a more recent historian of political and military intelligence in Ireland, chooses to take the idea of British intelligence in Ireland as something of an oxymoron. Focusing on the fact that the Easter Rising was ‘permitted’ to occur, he lays the blame for such poor intelligence work on four factors: the political danger faced by British officials who risked alienating parliamentarians if they struck at advanced nationalists; legal difficulties in getting Irish juries to convict people for political crimes; failure of the intelligence branches of the Royal Irish Constabulary and Dublin Metropolitan Police to collect effective information from suspects; and finally, the personality of Augustine Birrell, who, as his wife slowly went insane and began to die of a brain tumour between 1912 and 1915, rather understandably lost interest in his official duties as chief secretary.

In 1845, parliament passed an act establishing the three Queen’s Colleges in Ireland – Belfast, Galway and Cork – with the stipulation that ‘religious’ instruction in the colleges would have to be sponsored by voluntary organisations, not the state. Prior to 1845, parliament’s approach to providing spiritual guidance in state-run institutions had been one of ‘parallel patronage’, assuring that wherever there were individuals representing different denominational backgrounds, religious specialists from each denomination would be appointed to work in the institution. For example, the Prisons (Ireland) Act, 1826 required that Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican chaplains serve their respective portions of the prison population in each gaol that housed any of their co-denominationalists. But in 1845, parliament took an ostensibly different tack, implying that denominations would have to sponsor their young men’s study of theology or any other ‘religious’ subject at university level. However, this article argues that the Irish colleges bill gained assent from the liberal wing of parliamentary opinion precisely because it seemed, to early Victorian liberals, to instantiate the logic of parallel patronage. Using Thomas Wyse, Charles Buller, and T. B. Macaulay as cases in point, this article reveals that the logic behind this vision of state ‘neutrality’ as simultaneous support for each denominational interest was steeped in a working knowledge of colonialism.

The phenomenon of European migration during the early modern period — whether to overseas locations or across frontiers within Europe — is a complex one. In general, people migrate of their own volition from places of low opportunity or deprivation to areas of higher opportunity, where they hope to find employment or a better life.2 In the early modern period, however, the reasons why people migrated are less clear. Of course, many thousands migrated to improve their circumstances, usually in the hope of returning to make a permanent home in their place of origin. Yet, according to Nicholas Canny, English migration to transatlantic destinations in the early part of the seventeenth century was ‘high-risk subsistence migration’, since both the Chesapeake and the West Indies proved lethal for Europeans. The precise reasons why migrants continued to leave home, when such were the prospects before them, remain opaque to historians.

The history of the Church of Ireland between 1641 and 1690 has not excited much interest among historians over the past thirty years. It was not always so, and earlier generations of writers found more to describe or investigate in a period which saw effective disestablishment in the 1650s, restoration in the 1660s, and crisis in the later 1680s. Phillips devoted almost one hundred pages to these years: the 1640s and 1650s in the authoritative hands of St John D. Seymour, and the 1660s to 1680s (and beyond) covered by R. H. Murray. Mant’s History, published almost a century before Phillips, still provides a useful narrative and valuable quotations from primary sources. The much shorter treatment of J. T. Ball, first published in 1886, gave only 33 pages out of 305 to the period, but contained some perceptive comments. In other histories of the Church of Ireland the period receives more cursory treatment.

This article introduces a newly discovered essay by W. E. Gladstone, ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’, originally published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1834. The introduction examines the context of the essay’s composition, relating it to the young Gladstone’s commitment to the confessional state, as well as to the contemporary debate over the appropriation of the revenues of the Church of Ireland. It then attempts to explain how – through a combination of political circumstances, Gladstone’s subtle reshaping of the historical record, and editorial confusion – a significant article, published in a major Irish journal, went virtually unnoticed for more than 180 years. ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’, the text of which is reproduced here in full, constituted Gladstone’s first attempt to use the quarterly press to influence public opinion, anticipating his first book by four years, and what had previously been considered his first journal article by nine years.

Dr Terence Ranger in a stimulating and valuable article on Strafford in Ireland has taken the story of the Byrnes’ country as an example of ‘the combination of cunning, idealism and self-interest which characterised Strafford’s methods …’. He claims that ‘the truth is more complex and more interesting’ than others who have ‘not unravelled the full story’ supposed. Dr Ranger’s version of the truth has been completely endorsed, elegantly summarised and widely circulated by Miss Wedgwood.It will be contended that Dr Ranger has not unravelled the full story of an episode, which in some respects still defies unravelling, and that he has unwittingly misrepresented Strafford’s part in it. A fuller account, however inconclusive, may be of value, if it gives more accurate information about Strafford’s income from Irish land and about one episode in his policy of plantation.