In seventeenth-century Ireland the law increasingly defined and regulated relationships: between government and governed; between landlord and tenant; between master and servant; among the propertied; and even, by the end of the century, between Catholics and Protestants. This situation, similar to that throughout western Europe, signalled — at least superficially — England’s success in assimilating Ireland. The system of courts, centred on Dublin, and, through regular assizes and quarter sessions, borough, sheriffs’, church and manorial courts, reaching deep into the localities, was celebrated as a prime benefit, as well as the principal means, of anglicisation. The English policies which had progressively dismantled indigenous institutions, including the brehon law of Gaelic and gaelicised society, and replaced older Catholic with new Protestant élites, rested on statute, proclamation and judicial decree or process. Sincethe law was essential to England’s rule in Ireland, its opponents countered through the courts and legal argument: as a result, the functioning of the law, especially the quasi-judicial commissions which redistributed land, was politicised. Not only did the law accomplish, it also reflected these changes; for, bit by bit, Catholics were edged from the judicial bench and then disqualified from practising as barristers and attorneys. By the early eighteenth century the courts — publicly at least — were manned by and run for the burgeoning Protestant interest in Ireland.

Few commentators would dispute that, as regards historical records, 1922 was a year of destruction and displacement. Months before the conflagration in the Four Courts annihilated a broad cross-section of official records the departing representatives of the crown régime had turned their attention to those most recently in use. Nobody really knows how much of this material was deliberately burnt in Dublin Castle in the days preceding the takeover by Free State troops on 16 January 1922. It is all but certain that at least some intelligence files were destroyed: these would no doubt have identified informants, double agents, serving intelligence officers (whether English or Irish), and the more discreet crown servants. Certainly the new custodians were greeted by empty cupboards and bare shelves. Legends, which may or may not have been founded in reality, grew of the extent of the destruction and, by implication, of the scale of the guilty secrets thus concealed forever.

But the incoming officials were in no doubt, either, that much had been simply removed, whether to the Irish Office in London or to some other safe place. Assurances were offered to the Free State government by the departing Castle official A. W. Cope ‘that the only papers we are removing from the Castle to London are confidential papers relating to the political movement in this country. The removal of the papers will not hamper the future administration.’ Should any person apply for the return of papers seized in police raids during the conflict, their requests would be considered. Cope was being less than candid. During March an Irish Office official noted in an unmistakably complaining tone that the office was having to accommodate ‘a number of files belonging to the Crimes Special Department of the R.I.C. and an Irish Secret Service organisation. Some of the matter in these files is highly secret.’ The material occupied one hundred deed-boxes, half-a-dozen large packing cases, a couple of six-foot-high cupboards, along with thirty-eight card-index trays (‘twelve of them in cabinets’).

The Battle of Clontarf was fought in A.D. 1014 by the forces of Brian Boru, over-king of Munster, and his allies against the forces of Viking Dublin, Leinster and their foreign allies. The saga ‘The War of the Irish and the Foreigners’ (Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib) was written about events leading up the conflict and gives a dramatic account of events on the battlefield. It became the archetype for many later legends about Clontarf. This paper explores stylistic contrast in the saga between the terse description of events in the early Viking Age and the florid account of the reign of Brian Boru. This contrast has led some readers to conclude that two separate narratives were conflated in Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib – the first being a summary of annals and the second being a saga. However this paper argues that there is a unity of purpose throughout the work and that its stylistic divisions were deliberately contrived to help glorify Brian’s victory at the Battle of Clontarf.

When John Bramhall arrived on the shores of Ireland in 1633 to begin his new job as chaplain to the (also newly appointed) lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth, he was probably not yet forty years old. He immediately set about his role with the type of energy and ruthless devotion that came to characterise the Laudian regime that sent him. As John Morrill has indicated, nothing in the previous reign had prepared the Irish Protestant establishment ‘for the onslaught on their church to be mounted by William Laud.’ Historically, one of the problems with the Laudians is that while it is clear what they did, it is less clear why they did it. Typically, and shrewdly, they did not tend to be verbose concerning their motives.

‘The Song of Dermot and the Earl ’ is the title invented Mr. Goddard Orpen for the old Anglo-French poem which he edited, in 1892, from the sole manuscript in which it survives, among the Carew papers in the archiepiscopal library Lambeth Palace. As the Song is regarded generally as an important source for the history of the Anglo-Norman invasion Ireland, and as I have reached conclusions on that point serious different from those of the editor, I wish to submit my conclusions for examination.

Professor Desmond Bowen has stressed the importance of the religious question in determining the development of the nation in nineteenth century Ireland:

religion was of paramount importance in the lives of the two peoples or ‘nations’ of Ireland. Their leaders ‘speaking in the name of religion’ could exercise tremendous power because they spoke to the hearts of men in a way that no secular political movement could ever do. It was ‘religion’ in a broad sense that divided the people shaped their different cultures and persuaded them to breed separately and to work separately in a rapidly changing society.

Of course the past is dead. But it is kept alive by thinking and talking about it, and, above all, bv making it relevant to the present. The past is invoked variously, be it on a popular or on the academic level. In many areas, the popular view of the past is far removed from, and apparently uninfluenced by. the academic view, and, within limits, there is nothing wrong with that. Not every layman is expected to share the academic's understanding of the past. The matter becomes rather more serious when the reverse holds: that the view of the professional concurs with that of the lay people. If this is so, then indeed can it be said that those aspects of the past to which this applies are dead.

It is an axiom that each generation has to write history anew, partly, it seems, because understanding of the problems of the past becomes more refined, and partly because important aspects of the past may well appear in a different light to a new generation.

This article examines the career of the Irish Presbyterian minister and member of the Westminster parliament, James Little, as a case study of Presbyterian clerical responses to the Second World War in Northern Ireland. Establishing a more detailed narrative of contemporary interpretations of the conflict improves our understanding of the functions of religious institutions during the period. It demonstrates that Presbyterian church leaders were largely enthusiastic supporters of the war, employing theological language while promoting the agenda of unionist politics. By juxtaposing clerical politico-religious support for the war with their commitment to conservative moral standards, the article assesses the strength with which these views were held, thereby adding to our knowledge of Presbyterianism in the 1940s. The article also situates the Northern Ireland Presbyterian view of the war within the context of the United Kingdom.

On 23 January 1869 Gladstone visited Queen Victoria at Osborne and presented two papers relating to the proposed disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, ‘one of them on the general policy and effect of the measure, the other a dry recital of the purport of what would be the leading clauses of a bill’. The memorandum here presented is the former of these papers. Two copies of it are known, one in the Royal Archives at Windsor (D 25/6), the other among the Gladstone papers in the British Museum (Add. MS 44757, ff. 72-96v). The copy at Windsor is in Gladstone’s own hand, that in the British Museum is presumably the work of a secretary, though the hand has not been identified. Apart from insignificant variations, mainly in punctuation, the two copies are identical. That which follows is the version in the Royal Archives and is printed by gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. The paragraph-arrangement of the original hasbeen preserved, but the punctuation and use of capitals have been standardised according to the practice of this journal.

Henry Edward Duke, 1st Lord Merrivale, is one of the forgotten men of Anglo-Irish relations. Duke’s chief secretaryship of Ireland has been eclipsed by that of his tragic predecessor, Augustine Birrell; and he has generally been regarded as a mere caretaker, a stop-gap chief secretary, who, in the words of The Times obituarist, showed neither ‘imagination’ nor ‘breadth of view’, and had ‘no appreciation of the Irish psychology’. If he is remembered at all, it is for his lapsus linguae at the opening of the Irish convention on 25 July 1917 when he declared, to an astonished audience, ‘Gentlemen, one thing I have learned in the course of my experience, never despair of the republic’.

The ‘flight of the earls’ is considered one of the most intriguing events in Irish history. Traditionally, historians explaining this event have been divided into two schools of thought. Some have depicted the earls as offended innocents, forced into exile by unwarrantable pressure from Lord Deputy Chichester’s administration. Others have accepted the conspiracy theory, agreeing with the Dublin government’s contemporary view that the earls fled because they feared that their treasonable machinations had been uncovered. Since 1971, however, historical interpretation of the affair has been dominated by an article written by Nicholas Canny.

Departing from the previous lines of explanation, Canny focused on the intentions of the earl of Tyrconnell and Cuchonnacht Maguire to leave Ireland in 1607 as the key to understanding the flight. Anxious to leave the country because they were in acute financial difficulties, they were determined to seek profitable service with Archduke Albert, governor of the Spanish Netherlands. The ‘premature’ arrival of the ship that was sent to encompass Tyrconnell’s passage discomfited Tyrone, then preparing to go to court, causing him to ‘panic’ and take flight.

Seán Lemass remains an enigmatic figure in the study of contemporary Ireland. He became taoiseach in 1959, after a long and successful career in the leadership of Fianna Fáil. Notwithstanding this, he is widely associated with the transformation of Irish life that began under his stewardship between 1959 and 1966. In 1966, he convened the Informal Committee on the Constitution, often considered to be the most surprising initiative of his career. While change had not occurred by the time he died in 1971, the constitution had by this time become the focus for discussion, controversy and in some cases vilification. The questions this article seeks to answer are why Lemass promoted constitutional change and what were the consequences of this decision. More generally, it will assess the nature of constitutional change in a stable democratic state that is undergoing modernisation.

In dedicating his Specimen of the critical history of the Celtic religion and learning to Robert, Lord Molesworth, John Toland carefully outlined his attitude to historical writing: the ‘fundamental law of a historian is, daring to say whatever is true, and not daring to write any falsehood; neither being swayed by love nor hatred, nor gain’d by favour or interest: so he ought of course to be as a man of no time or country, of no sect or party: which I hope the several nations, concern’d in this present enquiry, will find to be particularly true of me’. These words, it will be contended, ought to be the starting-point for treating Toland, in the precision of his own words, ‘as a man of no time or country’. Recently there has been a renaissance of historical interest in the significance of the life and thought of Toland; particular attention has been paid to the question of his religious, cultural and national identity. Variously described as the ‘first Irish philosopher’, an adventurer in scholarship, ‘crazy John’, a ‘traditional Irish trickster’, a postmodernist and even a post-nationalist, Toland’s reputation as an elusive and ambiguous figure has replaced an older historiography that was confident in identifying him as a radical deist, or perhaps a ‘pantheist’ on the margins of the Enlightenment canon of philosophers of reason.

During the winter of 1713-14 the tory ministry in England began to disintegrate. Despite a massive tory victory at the 1713 election, the new parliament which met in the following spring did not furnish the court with a reliable majority in either house. The tory party had fallen into complete disarray Queen Anne’s deteriorating health was the root cause, giving rise to panic among tories. It was clear that there was little hope for them at Hanover, where Prince George, angry at thepeaceofutrecht, wascommitted to thewhigs. Some tories actively considered declaring for the Pretender Others, more afraid of a Jacobite restoration than the accession of a whiggish but protestant king, identified themselves as Hanoverians and voted against the ministry in parliament. The vast majority, whether Jacobite or Hanoverian, were agreed on the necessity of taking some decisive measures to crush the whigs and entrench themselves in power against the fateful day when the queen should die. More than ever they were impatient of the leadership of Lord Treasurer Oxford, the former Robert Harley, the essence of whose political management seemed to be duplicity and procrastination.

This paper explores the persistence of ecclesiastical influence on higher education in Ireland during an era of far-reaching policy change in the 1960s. The extensive interaction between political and official elites and the Catholic bishops offers a fascinating insight into the complex and contested process of policy formulation during an era of transformation in higher education. This study offers a re-interpretation of Whyte’s thesis that the Irish bishops displayed a ‘new flexibility’ in their response to governmental policy initiatives during this period, especially the initiative for university merger launched by Donogh O’Malley in 1967. Catholic prelates, notably John Charles McQuaid, the influential archbishop of Dublin, were pursuing a traditional Catholic religious and socio-political agenda in higher education, which sought not so much to accommodate new official initiatives as to shape such reforms in the ideological direction favoured by the bishops. McQuaid in particular enjoyed exceptional access to policy-makers and was an indispensable partner in launching the initiative for the university merger. The eventual failure of the merger, which was influenced by the successful resistance of academic elites and the declining significance of religious divisions in higher education, underlined the limits of ecclesiastical power in a rapidly changing society.

In the months following signature of the Anglo-Irish treaty the British government was particularly concerned with the transfer of power to a legally constituted government and parliament in Dublin which would be committed to implementation of the treaty and supported by an electoral majority This goal was, however, subject to an overriding consideration: preservation, at almost any cost, of the agreement embodied in the treaty The Collins-de Valera pact brought these considerations into conflict. It is the purpose of this paper to examine why the British government, and Winston Churchill in particular, objected so strenuously to the pact and why, despite these objections, an election under the terms of the pact was permitted.