Why the Reformation failed in Ireland was, until recent years, a matter for little debate. That it failed was beyond question and that its failure was inevitable was a premise seldom challenged. For many Irish historians, the root of its failure lay in the unswerving faith of a gallant people who resisted the attempts of a conquering force to impose upon them a creed at once heretical and foreign. Indeed, it was not until Brendan Bradshaw initiated a whole new approach to the history of the sixteenth century that this kind of view began to be firmly discarded. Others, like Nicholas Canny and, more recently, Steven Ellis and Alan Ford, have joined Bradshaw in questioning some of the old orthodoxies. The result of these endeavours has been, above all, to uncover the fact that the course of the Reformation in Ireland and the reasons for its failure were infinitely more complex than we once believed and, rather unexpectedly, one of the most tantalising issues raised by the debates which Bradshaw’s work has provoked has been the problem of precisely when the Reformation may be said to have failed in Ireland. Bradshaw and Canny have conflicting answers to that question and some of them will be considered here.

In May 1560 a new office was established in the Irish administration, the first to be introduced in almost twenty years. It was that strange creation, the office of secretary of state for Ireland. The chief inspiration behind its foundation was Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, and it is clear from his writings on the subject that he believed some special office of this kind was needed if the policy of reestablishing English government in Ireland was to be implemented successfully.

Between folios 179v and 181v of volume 216 of the state papers for Ireland is a document entitled ‘Discourse humbly presented by Richard Hadsor ...’ which a later hand has endorsed as having being written ‘probably some time in 1604 when Tyrone & Tyrconel were in peace’. In 1854 an anonymous scholar (possibly E.P. Shirley) published a transcript of the document in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, but without appending either notes or commentary on the text or investigating its authorship. In the first volume of the Jacobean series of the Calendar of State Papers, Ireland the editors, C. W. Russell and J.P. Prendergast, provided an almost complete transcript, suggesting that they too found it noteworthy. But since then the ‘Discourse’ has received virtually no further attention from historians. Yet it contains, among other things, the earliest articulation of a ‘three kingdoms’ approach to the new Stuart multiple monarchy. Two reasons may account for its neglect: first, neither the anonymous editor of 1854 nor Russell and Prendergast paid any attention to the question of the authorship of the treatise — the former being apparently of the view that certain sections of the text would be of interest to the journal’s antiquarian readership, while the latter mistakenly attributed the tract to either a Richard or a John Hudson, neither of whom was identifiable; secondly, its contents are odd, a mixture of useful information and relatively unconventional opinion.

The Irish house of commons in the eighteenth century was composed of 300 members: two were elected by each of the 32 counties; two by 117 boroughs; and two by Trinity College, Dublin. Only protestants were returned, for by an English act of 1691 all members of the Irish house of commons were required to take oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Catholics could still exercise the franchise until 1727, but an act of that year deprived them of the right to vote. The dissenters were equally excluded: a clause in an act of 1704 requiring all office-holders to receive communion according to the usage of the established church excluded them from the corporations and indirectly from the house of commons. Even the minority that remained was very inadequately represented.

In the counties the leading landlords were able to influence the return of members, and many of the Irish boroughs were quite as rotten as any in England prior to 1832. Bannow in co. Wexford, for example, was a mountain of sea-sand without a single inhabited house; at Clonmines in the same county there was one solitary house; at Harristown in co. Kildare there was none. A traveller in Ireland in 1755 found Naas ‘a shabby looking place’; Castle Dermot ‘a very poor town’; Callen ‘a poor dirty town, interspersed with the numerous ruins of old castles and religious houses’; Rathcormac ‘a poor borough’; and Kilmallock ‘a spacious street, composed of houses, which, though magnificent, were windowless and roofless’. The conclusion he came to was: ‘Happy would it be for Ireland, if her corporate towns were divested of the privilege of returning representatives to the great council of the nation; for it becomes the selfish policy of the lord of the soil to impoverish the voters into compliance’.

Capital cities play a significant role in interpreting a country’s past and charting its future. In the aftermath of the First World War nine new European states, Finland and Ireland among them, were confronted with the question of how to create a capital city befitting their new status and national identity. Instead of designing and constructing an entirely new capital city which would have marked a clean break from the past, all these states chose an existing city as the capital. This article will examine processes through which two capitals, Helsinki and Dublin, were renewed physically and symbolically to make the political change ‘real’ to people, but also to reinterpret the past and create a ‘teleology for the present’. The aim is to discuss the ways in which the changes, planned and implemented, both reflected and reinforced new interpretations of the history of the city and the nation, and the continuities and discontinuities the changes created between the past and the present. Some elements and versions of the past were chosen over others, preserved and reinvented in the cityscape, while others were ignored, hidden or denied.

In the past historians of the Anglo-Irish union have concentrated largely on the leading political figures. Peel, O’Connell, Gladstone, Parnell, Salisbury, Redmond, Asquith and Lloyd George and their Irish policies have all received detailed attention. For the years following the onset of the great agricultural depression, this tendency has been inevitably reinforced by the turmoil of politics following the Third Reform Act and Gladstone’s attempt to introduce home rule for Ireland.

Since the late 1980s crusade historiography has shown increasing interest in the periphery of Europe and the less ‘traditional’ crusading areas of Scotland, Wales, Poland and Scandinavia. Consideration of Ireland has formed part of this spread of interest, but, like many other areas, it remains comparatively unstudied. In part, the paucity of Irish texts relating to all kinds of crusading discourages research, as does the comparatively low number of known Irish crucesignati.

The year 1857 saw the first of the great riot commissions which provided much source material for Belfast history. It should be read as a continuation of the street conflict of that summer. Careful reading shows the skill with which the weak Catholic/Liberal alliance of the city managed the flow of witnesses and the naiveté of the Orange/Protestant lawyers. The Catholic/Liberal side ‘won’ the inquiry, achieving their aim of convincing the Dublin government that the local police force was ineffective if not sectarian and that Orange Order culture and evangelical street preaching was responsible for the disorder. Practical outcomes were limited. Resources were limited due to demands in other parts of Ireland and the process of taking first-class troops from Ireland to deal with the Indian mutiny. Considered in light of theories of ‘civil society’, the court was a means of countering the imperfections of representative government. Considered in the context of Ireland as a whole, events demonstrated the weakness of the Dublin authorities, their ignorance of Belfast and the importance of the resident magistrate. Much was concealed from the inquiry. The following months revealed evidence of an active Ribbon-style organisation, and the animosity of the local police and the constabulary. Attention to working class sectarianism diverted attention from elite failure to manage the class relationships of a fractured civil society.

If the major themes in Irish history during these years were the progressive decline of the protestant ascendancy, the rise of a catholic middle class, the growth of agrarian and urban popular politics and the social and economic consequences of a swelling population, then it would be generally assumed that parliamentary electioneering—at least until the passage of catholic emancipation in 1829—had very little to do with them. Supporters of such an assumption would argue that elections were largely the preserve of an élite—the protestant ascendancy—and that despite catholic enfranchisement in 1793 and the pruning of the most notorious close and rotten boroughs by the act of union, electioneering in Ireland was largely confined to wearisome bargaining between landlords, excessive drilling of freeholders both genuine and fictitious, unbecoming scrambles for Castle patronage and the almost indecent disposal of such ill-gotten gains amongst squads of dependents. Furthermore they might add as a confirmatory postscript, that the disfranchisement of the 40s.

Gladstone’s dramatic commitment of the liberal party to a policy of home rule for Ireland in 1886 was followed by the Grand Old Man’s two attempts at turning his policy into legislation. The first home rule bill, that of 1886, was defeated in the house of commons and then in a general election: the second, that of 1893, was overwhelmed in the house of lords and then dropped by Gladstone’s fourth government. Though the Gladstonian commitment remained and the liberal party continued to be a home rule party — and though the pros and cons of the union of 1800 remained the major structural feature of British party politics — it was not until 1912 that the liberals did anything further about their major Irish policy. For most of the period 1893-1912 they were, of course, impotent in opposition and consequently in no position to take the initiative on home rule. In 1906, however, they won a landslide victory over their unionist opponents and it is striking that this electoral victory and the great impulse it gave to one of the most dynamic governments in the whole history of British liberalism was not followed, as had the last two liberal victories under Gladstone, by the introduction of a third home rule bill. Had the liberal landslide of 1906 been put behind another home rule measure the whole history of the matter would certainly have been radically different. The house of lords would have been easily overwhelmed; the great advance in constitutional reform for Ireland would have been carried in a spirit of liberal reform rather than of political surrender; the development of Sinn Fein would have been frustrated or at least diverted. But the liberal victory of 1906 was not so used. Home rule was postponed and sidetracked and was taken up again only when the liberal party once more desperately needed Irish votes in the budget election which followed the rejection of Lloyd George’s financial measures by the lords in November 1909. The home rule banner was hoisted afresh by Asquith, the prime minister, in his Albert Hall speechof 10 December 1909 and the third home rule bill appeared in due course in 1912 in direct — and significant — succession to the budget and the parliament act for both of which the Asquith government needed Irish support in the commons.

In October 1912, Alfred Stead, who had succeeded his father, the veteran journalist, W. T. Stead, as editor of the Review of Reviews, after the elder Stead’s death on the Titanic during the preceding April, found Stead’s memorandum of his interview with John Redmond, in December 1906, among his father’s papers. In view of the current crisis of the Irish home rule bill, Alfred Stead planned to publish the memorandum under the title ‘What Mr Redmond thought : special interview by Mr W. T. Stead’ in the November issue of the Review of Reviews, and on 7 October, posted page proof of the interview to Redmond with a note requesting Redmond to inform him ‘whether there are any points which are not in accord with … [his] … remembrance of this interview’.

The value of the Irish Registry of Deeds as a source, particularly for social and economic historians, has long been underestimated. It first received serious consideration in a lecture delivered to the Conference of Irish Historians in 1943 by Mr Samuel Weir. Mr Weir’s estimate of the usefulness of this source ran as follows : ‘while making no claim that the documents preserved in the Registry of Deeds are primarily of historical value, it is claimed that they can be of immense value as corroborative evidence’. This guarded, almost apologetic statement was typical of the diffident attitude towards the registry which prevailed among historians both then and for some time thereafter.

Modern colonialism, writes Gyan Prakash, ‘instituted enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges — the colonizer and the colonized, the Occidental and the Oriental, the civilized and the primitive, the scientific and the superstitious, the developed and the underdeveloped’. Such dichotomies ‘reduced complex differences and interactions to the binary (self/other) logic of colonial power’, and colonial rulers ‘constituted the “native” as their inverse image’. Such perceptions of difference as ‘other’ expressed what ‘civilized’ Westerners believed themselves not to be — but also what they feared they might become, should they lose rational self-control. The ‘other’, writes Eva Kornfelt, ‘threatens the integrity of the self by offering alternative, unrealized, and suppressed possibilities’. As shown by Western fascination with the ‘noble savage’, this process could sometimes produce positive representations. Yet even these expressed the needs of the perceiver rather than the reality of the perceived. ‘Othering’, then, is a complex process, one implying deep cultural and individual needs, which may occasionally result in accurate representations, but more often produces self-justifying positive/negative dichotomies.

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party.

The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.

The following digest lists accessions to repositories in Great Britain and Ireland during 2013 relating to Irish history and reported to the National Archives: Historical Manuscripts Commission (T.N.A. H.M.C.). This information is also published on the internet via T.N.A.’s website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk) and is added to the computerised indexes of the National Register of Archives (N.R.A.) which are available for consultation at the National Archives, Kew, Richmond, TW9 4DU. Alternatively, searchers may access the indexes to the N.R.A. and certain linked on-line catalogues via the website. Limited and specific enquiries can be dealt with by post, or email ([email protected]).

During a twelve-week period in the late summer of 1828 upwards of a quarter of a million people participated in at least sixty mass demonstrations in the south-west of Ireland. Appearing to erupt spontaneously in response to Daniel O’Connell’s historic victory in the County Clare election in early July, these gatherings grew in size and complexity over the succeeding weeks; by late September jubilant but well-ordered assemblies of twenty and thirty thousand people — many marching in identical green uniforms and with military precision behind bands and colourful banners — were taking place simultaneously in several County Tipperary towns to support O’Connell’s crusade for Catholic emancipation.

Political demonstrations on this scale were virtually unprecedented outside the province of Ulster. While processions and large rallies had sometimes been used to honour important politicians during parliamentary elections, and while they had long been part of civic, military and religious pageantry, they had never before been staged in such a co-ordinated and prolonged fashion. What made these spectacles particularly remarkable, however, was that their participants were mainly drawn from the very lowest ranks of rural society and represented groups which had hitherto been excluded from the political process. The novelty of such people marching so often with uniforms and other military regalia caused widespread bewilderment and alarm. Journalists and magistrates liberally sprinkled their descriptions of the meetings with phrases such as ‘novel’, ‘portentous’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘frightful’, and ‘the strangest scene ever witnessed’. One of them observed that had such displays taken place even a few years earlier, they ‘would not only have been deemed factious but treasonable’. As the meetings swelled, many observers thought them to be the harbingers of a mass uprising.

This article will concentrate on two Irish republican projects from the 1930s: Cumann Poblachta na h-Éireann and the I.R.A.’s British bombing campaign. It will, in each case, focus on one leading individual: Cumann Poblachta’s Seán MacBride and, for the bombing campaign, the I.R.A.’s Seán Russell. Drawing on much material which has not previously been discussed in the literature, it will examine the self-sustaining republican mentality which characterised both projects and both individuals. It will be argued that republicanism in the 1930s is best understood in terms of the concept of solipsism, defined as the view that self is ‘the only thing really existent’. The argument is that republicans acted as though their own political views, beliefs and culture were the only really existent ones and that those of others could, as a consequence, be ignored. Republicans could — in the words of leading Irish-American republican, Joseph McGarrity — ‘pay no heed to public clamor’ as long as they felt that they were ‘doing a national duty’. As such, they were in possession of a self-sustaining but, it will be argued, ultimately self-defeating mentality.

The establishment of Irish legislative independence in 1782–3, once regarded as a watershed in Irish constitutional history, has more recently and quite properly been reduced to an achievement of modest proportions. According to the new historiographical orthodoxy, Irish legislative independence was an aberration in a period of increasing British political control, and one that actually encouraged the British ruling class to pursue the political assimilation of Ireland into Britain by means of a union. Historians now have a tolerably clear picture of the process by which William Pitt and the British executive gradually became convinced that an incorporating union provided the best solution to the constitutional anomalies and sectarian difficulties posed by the government of Ireland in the 1780s and 1790s.