The Irish Yeomanry was a voluntary, part-time military force raised in 1796 for local law-and-order duties, with the potential for full military service during invasion or insurrection. It consisted of locally organised corps of up to 100 men serving under commissioned officers, paid, armed and equipped by government. The Irish Yeomanry and Orange Order are popularly associated to the extent of being semantically linked in songs: for example, one ballad claims that the Orangeman:

The primary sources apparently corroborate this with much evidence of ostentatiously ‘Orange’ displays by yeomen. On 12 July 1797 eight Catholic Kerry militiamen were killed in Stewartstown, County Tyrone, in a brawl with yeomen and Orangemen after a militiaman seized an Orange cockade. At Hillsborough in October 1798 ‘a party of Yeoman Infantry (calling themselves Orangemen) beat a number of poor Papists out of the market’. Yet to automatically accept the received view on the ‘Orange yeomanry’ risks anachronistical determining cause by consequence.

Parnell remains an enigma to historians. As a protestant and a landowner, he would seem to have had every reason to oppose the home rule movement and certainly little incentive to take an active part in it. Nor does it appear that he had any clearly developed policies in mind to be followed in an autonomous Ireland. One simple explanation is that Parnell was driven by a strong dislike of England, and in particular of its upper class political leadership. Yet until the age of nineteen, when he went to Cambridge, Parnell had spent only relatively brief periods among the English—and these mainly at small private schools. He was briefly at school in Somerset at the age of six, and in Derbyshire when he was eight. At the age of fifteen he was sent to a private tutor and from there entered Magdalene College, Cambridge in October 1865. There he remained until May 1869 when he failed to return from rustication imposed after he had been successfully sued for asasult in a local court.

The period 1461 to 1603 is crucial in the determination of the character of modern Irish history It divides fairly evenly at 1534 into a first phase in which the medieval order reaches its culmination and into a second in which the destruction of much of that order is completed and the foundations for the modern colonial period are laid. In the first, life in all its aspects is variegated with separate and interpenetrating social and governmental groupings of considerable complexity.

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 retention by the Fianna Fáil government of the land annuities in 1932 and the consequent trade dispute with Great Britain, the ‘economic war’, is a subject extensively covered in the existing historiography, both in terms of the diplomatic and economic facets of the dispute. Opposition by the opponents of Fianna Fáil to the collection of land annuities has been well documented in the context of the political conflict between supporters and opponents of the treaty. Another trend in the historiography has emphasised, as the central characteristic of the anti-annuity payment campaign, the opposition by farmers to the payment of annuities on economic and social rather than on political grounds. Paul Bew and others have argued that large farmers supported the Blueshirts during the ‘economic war’ for material reasons; Mike Cronin has argued that the crisis of the ‘economic war’ encouraged opposition to de Valera’s policies among farmers, rather than pro-Treaty political considerations; and Andrew Orridge has also argued that the anti-annuity payment campaign included both a political element, in the form of Blueshirt hostility to Fianna Fáil, and a non-political element, on the part of farmers protesting at how their dependence on agricultural exports to Britain was threatened by Fianna Fáil policies.

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 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.

The history of financial administration in both Great Britain and Ireland is such a neglected subject that it is not surprising to find the years 1641–9, which form a period of special difficulty and confusion, receiving scarcely any attention from serious historical scholars. During this time the responsible authorities in Ireland, England, and Scotland, devoted much time and thought to raising money for the British forces in Ireland. The problems with which they were confronted, and the methods by which they attempted to solve these problems, have an important bearing on the course of the rebellion in Ireland and on its ultimate result.

In attempting a study of local government in Ireland at the beginning of the Tudor period, it must be stated that only very tentative conclusions can be made as to its nature and effectiveness. This is due on the one hand to lack of materials and difficulty in interpreting what there are, and on the other to the absence of detailed studies of Anglo-Irish feudalism and of Irish society in the later medieval period.

In theory, the royal administration, established in Dublin and organised on English lines, was competent to provide law and government for the whole island. In practice, its effectiveness diminished successively in four groups of territories.

The recent rediscovery of Herbert Gladstone’s rather fragmentary journal for 1880-85 has made it possible to throw more light on the Irish situation as seen through liberal eyes in the period leading up to the ‘ Kilmainham treaty ’. We wish to thank Sir William Gladstone, Bt, firstly for locating the journal at Hawarden Castle, Flintshire, and secondly for his good offices in making available for publication the section relating to Irish affairs in 1881-2. The irregularly kept volume extends to about 250 quarto pages, but apart from the entries made in 1881-2 it contains little material of more than marginal significance.

On 19 December 1946, the Irish President, Seán T. O'Kelly, signed the Unemployment Insurance Act into law. This innocuous-sounding piece of legislation has received very little attention from historians, but was of great importance to one section of post-war Irish society. Under its terms, Dublin and London entered into a special scheme whereby Irish men and women who had served with the British forces during the Second World War were allowed to claim British unemployment insurance payments, while still resident in the twenty-six counties of independent Ireland. Coming at a time of unemployment and economic slump in Ireland, this was of crucial importance to many exservicemen. This article will explore the background, negotiation and implementation of the unemployment insurance agreement, and will speculate on the reasons why the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, agreed to it. It will also examine the British side of the scheme and explore London's motives, both concrete and notional.

The relationship between constitutional and advanced or physical-force nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland was always tense and intimate. Both traditions professed to repudiate the stated aims and strategies of the other, while at the same time often co-operating across the apparent ideological and organisational divides. The Fenians worked with Isaac Butt’s early home rule movement, while the New Departures of the late 1870s facilitated I.R.B. involvement in the Land League and the home rule movement, proving crucial to the emergent leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell. Although this ideological flexibility was often motivated by a self-interested desire to be associated with influential organisations and personalities, it also arose from the realisation that the ideal strategy was currently inappropriate. The essence of the New Departure lay in allowing physical-force men to join the agrarian agitation of the Land League on the understanding that this did not compromise their separatist ideals. Consequently, the self-identification of separatists at the time of the 1916 rising as belonging to an immemorial tradition, consecrated by the blood of martyrs, needs to be set against both the contingency of political engagement and the lack of precision as to the form of state a separate Ireland might take.