Nineteenth-century contested elections were by no means sedate affairs. Dickens’s ‘Eatanswill’, with its mob violence, voters being bribed, locked up, rendered insensible and thrown into canals, found echoes in real events. Bribery, violence, shouting, fighting and horse-play were ‘relatively minor’ features but certainly present in the election at Warwick in 1868 for example. The Victorian system introduced to Ireland could be an explosive mixture indeed. About a fifth of Dr Theodore Hoppen’s recent major work, Elections, politics and society in Ireland, 1832–1885, is devoted to violence including a section specifically on electoral violence. Corruption was also common, and petitions to parliament objecting to the conduct of individual elections and demanding a fresh ballot were not infrequent.

Paul Cullen (1803-78) became archbishop of Armagh in 1849, after long service as rector of the Irish College in Rome, returned to Ireland the following vear, was translated to Dublin in 1852 and created cardinal in 1866. The picture of Cardinal Cullen as a prelate whose brand of ultramontanism made him an inveterate opponent of Irish nationalism, both constitutional and revolutionary, ought not to have survived the work of Monsignor Corish, Fr Mac-Suibhne and Dr John Whyte. In fact, this caricature has been perpetuated by such established historians as Professor Dudley Edwards, Dr F. S. L. Lyons and others. They continue to reproduce the hostile view which several generations of nationalist writers have taken of Cullen’s actions and motives in Irish politics. Take the charge that in the 1850s he tried to put an end to the clerical participation in politics which had been so important in the national movement. ‘Archbishop Cullen of Dublin attempted to withdraw the clergy completely from politics’ —thus Professor Edwards in A new history of Ireland (1972), writing as if Dr MThyte had never examined this question with the compulsive impartiality typical of him.

Despite the importance of the new science in the colonisation of Stuart Ireland, and the many Irish links to major figures in the Scientific Revolution, these connections remain relatively little studied outside of major episodes such as the Down Survey. This article examines a much smaller project, the ‘Computatio Universalis’ (1684) of Church of Ireland clergyman (later bishop of Down and Connor) Samuel Foley (1655–1695). Submitted to the Dublin Philosophical Society in 1684 as an attempt to ‘to demonstrate a universal standard’ of value, Foley’s project was in fact a guide to the achievement of ‘happiness’ through the careful stewardship of time and wealth. Foley’s project recalls earlier Christian humanist and Protestant concern with stewardship, however, and also reflects seventeenth-century economic writers’ and moral reformers’ concern with avoiding idleness. In the context of Restoration Ireland, however, it can also be seen more specifically as a project harnessing new methods of quantification for the cultural maintenance of a ruling Protestant elite historically threatened by degeneration in a colonial setting, as well as a reflection of Protestant anxieties about the Catholic church’s control over time.

Offering new insights into Irish links with the wider world, this article explores and contextualises Irish nationalist perceptions of and links with central European small states in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The belief that any small nation like Ireland, oppressed by a dominant neighbour, had the right to self-determination was of key importance in nationalist political rhetoric during the revolutionary years. Given the similarity of circumstances among newly independent small states, Irish commentators were aware of the struggles Ireland shared with the successors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Personal encounters on the continent, as well as news regarding small nations in central Europe, shaped Irish opinions of the region. Certainly, the images presented by Irish commentators reflected their own political agendas and were therefore often deliberately idealistic. Nonetheless, they served a specific purpose as they were meant to further Ireland's interest on the international stage. Looking beyond Ireland for lessons and examples to follow became a frequent part of Irish nationalist political rhetoric. By directing scholarly attention to a hitherto less explored aspect of Irish historiography, this article aims to highlight the complexity of Ireland's connection with the continent within the framework of small nations, from a transnational perspective.

In her vivid account of the Irish theatre movement, Máire Colum described the first evening of Lady Gregory's Gaol Gate at the Abbey Theatre on 20 October 1906. The performance was delayed until Yeats arrived; he was accompanied by a tall woman dressed in black. As soon as they appeared, there was a violent reaction in a section of the audience:

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond were among the élite of Hiberno-Norman society in Ireland. Equalled in status among the nobility of Ireland only by the earls of Kildare and of Ormond, the Desmonds possessed great power, wealth and influence. Their huge earldom, which covered much of Munster, rendered them the virtual masters of the province and of all the Gaelic Irish and Hiberno-Norman lords therein.

Yet by 1584 they were gone, the earl of Desmond killed while in rebellion, the earldom broken up as an entity, the estates and castles in ruins. Apart from a short-lived return at the end of the century, the house of Desmond was defunct.

The dramatic fall of the house of Desmond has intrigued many historians, who seek its cause in the period leading up to the 1580s and in the political context of the time. They cite the breakdown of the earl’s control, the indebtedness of the earldom, the alleged madness and incapacity for rule of Gerald, the fifteenth earl. They refer to the extension of crown control in Elizabethan Ireland, the English fear of foreign intervention in Ireland, and the campaign for conformity to the new Protestant religion.

The work of J. Murstfield and H. E. Sell hns directed the attention of historians to the importance of the English court of wards and liveries, both as an instrument of fiscal policy and as a welfare organisation for the children and widows of the king's tenants. In the Public Record Office, Lonclon, a great mass of material remains to throw light on every aspect of the court's activity. More recently Dr H. F. Kearney has published a uselul and suggestive paper on the Irish court of wards which was principally concerned with the reign of Charles I. A more detailed appraisal of the earlier period is not easy since the records of the Irish court of wards have, like those of other departments of state, suffered wholesale loss or destruction. It seems unlikely that the wards papers were ever placed in public archives: they apparently never reached the old Public Record Office in Dublin to be consumed in the holocaust of 1922. Consequently, the student has to work from public and private papers scattered throughout these islands in libraries, record ofices and private collections.

Though Belfast's present position as a great centre of trade was won for her chiefly by the manufacture of linen and the building of ships, the foundation of her prosperity, contrary to popular belief, is to be traced to the cotton industry, which had its rise about the year 1790 and flourished till about 1830, when the linen industry which had then been gathering force in Ireland profited from a slump in the cotton industry and ousted it from its preeminence. The manufacture of cotton was begun in Leinster and Munster as early as 1750, and, before 1782, was developed in the counties of Cork, Carlow, Dublin, Meath, Kildare and Waterford. The Linen Board, strangely enough, encouraged the cotton industry by the payment of bounties that were intended solely for mixed fabrics, that is cloth made of linen warp and cotton weft. As the manufacturers used the money for the purchase of spinning jennies and carding machines, the Linen Board was, in fact, subsidising the cotton manufacture.

This article examines the memoirs written by Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, fourth earl of Carnarvon, concerning his period as lord lieutenant of Ireland between June 1885 and January 1886, in the brief Salisbury administration. Carnarvon inherited many of the problems of his Liberal predecessor, fifth Earl Spencer, telling Salisbury ‘the day of reckoning in this case will come very rapidly if any unwise promises are made or implied’. Nevertheless he was sympathetic to reform in many different fields, notably home rule, land reform, education and religion. A sensitive politician, Carnarvon penned this memorandum shortly after leaving office in an attempt to uphold his reputation. The memorandum gives a number of insights into Carnarvon’s manoeuvrings in cabinet, and demonstrates the workings of high politics in the late-nineteenth century. It was never published.

Ireland’s political and constitutional relationship to England remains a key theme of late medieval and early modern Irish history. Although it was a relationship in which Ireland was undoubtedly the subordinate kingdom, contemporary justifications for this subordination, and assertions of its basis, are often overshadowed by arguments directed against its validity. The text reproduced below is an assertion of that validity. It offers a highly selective analysis of English policy in Ireland from the twelfth century to the end of the seventeenth, based upon the assumption of Ireland’s legal and constitutional subordination to England. More particularly, it seeks to outline attitudes among the Protestant colonial community towards Ireland’s status, and does so at a precise juncture when such attitudes were deemed to be of imminent and crucial importance.

For long there has been accepted as genuine a charter, purporting to be issued by Henry III, which follows the text of his first reissue of the Great Charter in favour of his English subjects but which has been to some extent modified to adapt it to Irish conditions. This document, to which the title Magna Carta Hiberniae has been applied, has received an official cachet by its inclusion, with no mark of suspicion, in the first volume of the Early statutes of Ireland, edited by H. F. Berry. In undertaking a careful enquiry into the transmission of the text and its historical background, Dr. Dudley Edwards has performed a valuable service and, as a result, the authenticity of the supposed charter is, at least, very much open to question. He might, indeed, have gone further than he has done and have stated as a positive conclusion his tentative conjecture ‘ that Magna Carta Hiberniae is an adaptation of Henry's first charter, compiled in Ireland ’.

A list from September 1939 of files destroyed by the Department of External Affairs in the invasion scares of 1939–40 contains an intriguing reference to the possibility of dispatching Irish military forces to the Saarland on the Franco-German border in the winter of 1934–5. There they would serve as part of an international peacekeeping force while a plebiscite on the status of the territory was carried out under League of Nations auspices in January 1935. The context of this article is the events surrounding the creation of the peacekeeping force in December 1934.

That the Irish Free State should be mentioned as a possible contributor to the international force for the Saar is an illustration of the emerging mediatory role the state was to adopt after its three-year term on the League Council concluded in September 1933. With an Irish diplomat, Sean Lester, seconded to League service as High Commissioner in Danzig from 1934, and with Irish-born Edward Phelan, Assistant Director of the International Labour Organisation, being mentioned as a possible contender for the League post of Deputy Secretary-General in 1933, and with Eamon de Valera rising in importance as an international statesman and League supporter, Ireland’s involvement in the Saar was both an illustration and a result of the state’s prominent position in the League in the early to mid-1930s.

Among emigrants, the canny and the politic have often risen to some influence. It is flattering to believe that such people made a difference. But for most, ubi panis, ibi patria — conformity and loyalty were the natural price of daily bread and the essential cost of any real eminence. Even constructive opposition presupposed this. Those who thought otherwise were marginalised, sensibly enough, by their hosts.