Trotsky of Russia knows Francis McCullagh. So does President Calles of Mexico. Peter, the King of Serbia, was McCullagh’s friend. The headhunters of the upper Amazon list Francis McCullagh as one of their principal deities. The warring tribes of Morocco call him blood brother. A room is always ready for him in the imperial palace of Siam. The latchstrings of hundreds of Siberian peasant huts are out in anticipation of his coming.

In June 1569 an English gentleman named Robert Mainwaring was seized on the borders of County Carlow by Irish rebels. They forced a noose around his neck, tightened it, and proceeded to drag him ‘up and down in a halter’, like a man condemned to be hanged. As with many terrorist acts, Mainwaring’s degradation was a carefully calculated publicity stunt, and it quickly achieved its objective. News of his predicament was relayed to London, where the identity of his captors aroused widespread alarm in government circles. He was persecuted on the orders of Sir Edmund Butler of Cloghgrenan, a leading Anglo-Irish lord who was the brother and principal heir of the then childless tenth earl of Ormond, Thomas Butler, and the recent recipient of some generous grants of land and office from the crown. Despite Sir Edmund’s position as deputy governor of the hitherto loyal Ormond lordship in Counties Kilkenny and Tipperary, it soon became clearthat his seizure of Mainwaring had signalled the outbreak of a general revolt by several branches of the Butler family.

This article examines the case of Helen Arthur, a Catholic and Jacobite Irish woman who travelled with her children to France following William III’s victory over James II in the War of the Two Kings (1689–91). It considers Helen’s circumstances and her representation in The Popish pretenders to the forfeited estates in Ireland, a pamphlet published in London in 1702 as a criticism of the act of resumption. The act, introduced by the English parliament in 1700, voided the majority of William III’s grants to favourites and supporters. Its provisions offered many dispossessed, including the dependants of outlawed males, a chance to reclaim compromised or forfeited property by submitting a claim to a board of trustees in Dublin. Helen Arthur missed the initial deadline for submissions, but secured an extension to submit through a clause in a 1701 supply bill, a development that brought her to the attention of the anonymous author of The Popish pretenders. Charting Helen’s efforts to reclaim her jointure, her eldest son’s estate and her younger children’s portions, this article looks at the ways in which dispossessed Irish Catholics and/or Jacobites reacted to legislative developments. More specifically, it shines a light on the possibilities for female agency in a period of significant upheaval, demonstrating opportunities for participation and representation in the public sphere, both in London and in Dublin. It also considers the impact of the politicisation of religion upon understandings of women’s roles and experiences during the Williamite confiscation, and suggests that a synonymising of Catholicism with Jacobitism (and Protestantism with the Williamite cause) has significant repercussions for understandings of women’s activities during the period. It also examines contemporary attitudes to women’s activity, interrogating the casting of Helen as a ‘cat’s paw’ in a bigger political game, invariably played by men.

In comparison to many parts of post-war Europe, Ireland's wars between 1919 and 1923 were not as lethal as they might have been. This article addresses some of the possible reasons why, reasons that were quite specific to the immediate Anglo-Irish context but reasons that may also have been due to broader transnational understandings of what it was to be a soldier, what it was to fight at that time. But while comparative fatality rates may leave Ireland somewhat overshadowed, this article considers what Ireland's wars still share with other conflicts and looks at some of the dimensions of Irish violence that were, irrespective of numbers killed, still fundamentally the same as violence experienced in other periods and places. Tackling some of the challenges of contemporary comparisons, the article suggests other possible comparisons ranging far beyond the inter-war period that may prove more fruitful, and asks whether the nature of violence shapes our perceptions of a conflict far more than fatality rates do.

A hitherto unpublished text of a negotiated settlement between Walter de Lacy, lord of Meath (d. 1241), and the canons of St Thomas's Abbey, Dublin, relating to the church of Ardmulchan in County Meath sheds new light both on the career of Theobald Walter I (d. 1205), ancestor of the Butler earls of Ormond, and on the dealings of John, son of King Henry II of England, with his Irish lordship during the period 1185–99 for which sources are scarce. It indicates that not only in Leinster, but also in Meath, John encroached on the seigneurial rights of Anglo-Norman landholders.

The emigration of female revolutionary activists has largely eluded historical studies; their global movements transcend dominant national and regional conceptions of the Irish Revolution and challenge established narratives of political exile which are often cast in masculine terms. Drawing on Cumann na mBan nominal rolls and U.S. immigration records, this article investigates the scale of post-Civil War Cumann na mBan emigration and evaluates the geographical origins, timing and push-pull factors that defined their migration. Focusing on the United States in particular, it also measures the impact of the emigration and return migration of female revolutionaries – during the revolutionary period and in its immediate aftermath – on both the republican movement in Ireland and the fractured political landscapes of Irish America. Ultimately, this article argues that the cooperative transatlantic exchange networks of Cumann na mBan, and the consciously gendered revolutionary discourse they assisted in propagating in the diaspora, were integral to supporting the Irish Revolution at home and abroad.

Writing in Nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858–1928, Tom Garvin observed that ‘well over 40 per cent, perhaps 50 per cent, had lived outside Ireland for considerable periods … foreign experience was very important in the development of the leaders’. The impact of ‘foreign experience’ on leading nationalist revolutionaries, this article submits, pace Garvin, could have proved influential in the development of the Irish Revolution more widely. Between June 1919 and December 1920, Éamon de Valera toured the United States. From New York City to Salt Lake City, Alabama to Montana, the self-proclaimed president of the Irish republic addressed ‘Ireland’ in hundreds of interviews and speeches. Of these myriad public statements, his Cuban missive, notably, crossed national boundaries. Comparing Ireland's geo-strategic relationship with Great Britain to that of Cuba and the United States, de Valera's argument for an independent Irish republic was made in the Americas. How did de Valera's movement across the U.S. alter his political views of Ireland? How were presentations of de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ mediated across the ‘Irish world’? How did discourse on the Monroe Doctrine inform Anglo-Irish negotiations between Truce and Treaty? Exploring de Valera's ‘Cuban policy’ as global case study, this article concludes, ultimately, can shift the historiographical significance of ‘foreign experience’ from nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland to the flows and circulation of transnational revolution.

Eunan O’Halpin’s short paper, ‘The secret service vote and Ireland, 1868- 1922’, raises important questions about accountability for the payment of money for secret service work, a term not defined in any statute in nineteenth-century Ireland. What did ‘secret service work’ include and to what extent was the money properly authorised?

The purpose of this article is to examine some of the legal implications of the use of secret service money Accounts for 1833 in the Hatherton papers show the amount of money paid, to whom and for what purposes. Edward John Littleton, first Baron Hatherton (1791 – 1863), was chief secretary for Ireland in 1833 and 1834 during the second lord lieutenancy of Marquis Wellesley This article is based largely on evidence drawn from the Hatherton papers and raises questions about the impartiality of justice in Ireland.

The growth of interest in urban studies in recent years had induced scholars to take a new interest in Irish immigrants to Britain during the nineteenth century. The Irish encountered most of the problems of immigrants and were the subject of much comment from contemporary English writers. Moreover, since they constituted a small but homogeneous minority, easily discernible in the larger community, they can be conveniently studied in depth. The purpose of this article is not, however, to do this so much as to enter a few caveats for anyone thinking of specialising in one facet of Irish immigration to Britain, namely, juvenile deliquency. The subject of delinquency among Irish children in Britain, which has intrigued Englishmen for at least 150 years, has taken on new importance in recent times, partly as a result of the revival of an old allegation that there is a connexion between Catholicism and crime. Formerly, the assertion was made by ultra-protestants, especially Recordite evangelicals. Now it is being made by some English Roman Catholic priests. While this article will not deal conclusively with the overall question of a connexion between Catholicism and crime, it is intended to argue that, at least as far as Irish immigrant catholics in nineteenth-century London were concerned, such a connexion could not reasonably be said to exist. In the course of doing so, it will contend that, even granting that the Irish were a police problem as distinct from a crime control problem, there is, nevertheless, evidence of police prejudice against them. It also aims to show that destitution and vagrancy were common among London’s juvenile poor, especially the Irish, and that destitute juveniles were frequently classified as delinquent juveniles and treated accordingly. Finally it will put forward evidence to suggest that some English protestant philanthropists, including some evangelicals, have through over-generalisation, and perhaps unwittingly, caricatured the London Irish.

Even though violent popular protest was a common feature of life in early eighteenth-century Dublin, the riots that broke out in 1729 were exceptionally severe and long-lasting and resulted in the worst disorder to occur in the capital in decades. Over a ten-month period rival gangs rioted against each other or against government forces, causing a considerable degree of destruction, injury and death. At the height of the disorder, in late spring and summer, ‘vast numbers’ of people were reportedly beaten and abused by rioters, and residents of the city became fearful for their personal safety. According to the Dublin Intelligence citizens moved ‘mostly in a kind of hurry’ on account of the riots; parts of the city became no-go areas, and gangs of ‘reprobates’ gathered on the outskirts of the city to rob travellers and rape women. The political elite voiced their concerns too, in particular at the length of time the disorder was lasting. The archbishop of Armagh, Hugh Boulter, wrote to the secretary of state, the duke of Newcastle, from Dublin in March 1730 complaining that they had ‘suffered very much from riots and tumults in this town last summer and even during the present sitting of the parliament’.

The negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny endured, except for brief intervals, from the signing of a truce on 15 September 1643 until two weeks before the king's death (30 January 1649), when, too late, they culminated in a treaty. On the royalist side they were officially directed by the marquis of Ormond, but in practice a number of agents were active at various times on the king's behalf. Of essentially secondary interest to Charles, the negotiations absorbed much of the time and energy of the confederation and undoubtedly contributed to its eventual downfall.

The creation of a network of county infirmaries was a remarkable achievement in late eighteenth-century Ireland. Supported by grants from parliament and the county grand juries, each hospital was managed by governors whose subscriptions entitled them to appoint the medical staff and decide on the patient population. While the laudable aim of the legislators was that the infirmaries would be ‘a means of restoring the health and preserving the lives of many’, the reality was quite different. In 1788 the prison reformer, John Howard, and the inspector general of prisons, Sir Jeremiah Fitzpatrick, delivered a damning report to parliament on the state of the county infirmaries. They described good care and governance in a minority of institutions, but most were in a very bad state; they noted decayed and broken buildings, dirty or no bedding, poor food, lack of regulation, financial malfeasance, few patients and absent staff. Based on their report, this paper argues that the county infirmaries benefited the governors and the staff considerably, and had little impact on the health of the nation. However, providing a hospital and trained medical professionals in every county was a significant step in the formation of the Irish institutional healthcare system.

The state papers in the State Paper Office, Dublin Castle, are the documents which were received or created in the office of the chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland and in a small number of related offices or departments. The departments or related offices were: the convict department, with records for 1778–1924; the privy council department, with records for 1800–1922; the chief crown solicitor’s department, with records for 1848–1922; the police and crime department, with records for 1848–1920; and the general prisons board, with records for 1836–1928.