The marquess of Ormond's surrender of Dublin to the forces of the English parliament in the summer of 1647 has been seen as marking the demise of the Church of Ireland, with ministers given the choice of adopting the Presbyterian Directory for Public Worship or fleeing the country. This article examines the survival of the church thanks to the benign influence of the governor of Dublin, Colonel Michael Jones, and his brother, Dr Henry Jones, bishop of Clogher. Under Michael Jones's rule the Book of Common Prayer continued to be used, ministers were appointed to vacancies, and clerical networks continued to operate. It was only after the Cromwellian invasion in August 1649, and the replacement of Jones by the Cromwellian hard-liner, Colonel John Hewson, that the church was forced out of business – a process completed with its formal abolition by the autumn of 1650.

Existing evidence pertaining to Ireland’s Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) strongly lends itself to the impression that the majority of Old English Palesmen, at least those of higher social status, chose to support the English crown during this conflict rather than their co-religionist Gaelic Irish countrymen. Loyalties, however, were anything but straightforward and could depend on any number of cultural values, social concerns, and economic incentives. Nevertheless, James Fitzpiers Fitzgerald, a ‘Bastard Geraldine’ who served as sheriff of Kildare, seemed to have been driven by a genuine sense of duty to the English crown and establishment. With the outbreak of hostilities in the 1590s, Fitzpiers proved to be a devout crown servitor, risking life and limb to confront the English queen’s Irish enemies. But, in late 1598 he suddenly, and somewhat inexplicably, threw his lot in with the Irish confederacy, defying the government he had once championed. During the ensuing investigation, the Dublin administration accumulated much damning evidence against Fitzpiers, including a patriotic plea from rebel leader Hugh O’Neill which urged Fitzpiers to defend his Irish homeland from the oppressions of English Protestant rule. Yet, at the very same time, a counter case was made by Fitzpiers’s controversial English friend, Captain Thomas Lee, which argued that Fitzpiers’s actions were more loyal than anyone could have imagined. Through an examination of Fitzpiers’s perplexing case, this paper will explore the complicated nature of allegiances in 1590s Ireland and how loyalties were not always what they seemed.

Veronica L., a woman with an intellectual disability, died of starvation in 1961 while the recipient of a Disabled Person's Maintenance Allowance (D.P.M.A.) from the Dublin Health Authority. Her death occured after a prolonged period of deficient care, a neglect that was exacerbated by flaws in statutory welfare. During the preceding decade the state intervened in disability provision to an unprecedented degree through the expansion of institutional care and social welfare reform. Yet, these services remained characterised by a chronic pressure on resources and a reluctance to intervene in potentially neglectful family situations, which allowed cases of failing care to go unaddressed. Drawing on contemporary documents, in particular the depositions collected for the coroner's court inquest into Veronica's death, this article offers an insight into the exigencies underlying the later life of one woman with an intellectual disability. In doing so, it explores the way in which this singular case provides a distinctive avenue for better understanding the experiences of the intellectually disabled more broadly, including the nature of community care and the operation of statutory welfare during the mid twentieth century.

The 1886 general election found Parnell at the helm of a well-disciplined nationalist party. In its struggle for home rule, the Irish Parliamentary Party (I.P.P.) had been helped along the way by the newly formed Irish Protestant Home Rule Association (I.P.H.R.A.), which in July 1886 had no fewer than six M.P.s in its ranks. Jeremiah Jordan, nationalist Member of Parliament for West Clare, was one of the six. Born in 1830 at Tattenbar, near Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, the son of a tenant farmer and a Wesleyan Methodist, he was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen. He started a grocery and provision business in Church Street, Enniskillen, and the town’s Young Men’s Society served as a training ground for his intellectual and oratorical skills, as did his appointment as a part-time Methodist lay preacher. Jordan had a passion for the sport of hunting and an intense dislike of idleness.

During the budget speech of 1830, Henry Goulburn, the chancellor of the exchequer, announced: ‘On the people of that country [Ireland] the same stamp duties will be imposed as are imposed here.’ The government planned ‘to assimilate the laws relating to the stamp duties in different parts of the empire to place the management of the whole of that branch of the revenue under the Stamp-Office in England.’ This proposal was one of several announced by Goulburn to counter the economic slump that the United Kingdom was experiencing after a number of poor harvests. Along with specific measures designed to relieve distress, the Wellington government aimed at ensuring there was no loss of revenue in order to prevent further government borrowing.

Contributions to this special issue of Irish Historical Studies come under the dedicated theme of ‘Ireland and the British Empire-Commonwealth’. The papers originate from a workshop entitled ‘Ireland and empire’ that took place at the University of Leeds in March 2005. One of the key objectives behind the organisation of this workshop was to bring together specialists in British, Irish and imperial and Commonwealth history with an interest in the wide-ranging debates linked to the issue of ‘Ireland and empire’. At the workshop, the papers presented a range of topics within the context of literature and the arts; agriculture and industry; metropolitan politics and diplomacy. The overarching theme was the ‘Irish experience’ within an ‘interconnected British world’ during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

St Finnian of Clonard died, according to the Annals of Ulster, in 549. With the possible exception of the sixth, seventh and eighth century annal entries and of the Catalogus Sanctorum all the evidence for a study of his work dates from or after the ninth century. It is however possible to say with reasonable assurance what traditions of his life were accepted about three hundred years after his death, and to trace the development of his cult from the late eighth century onwards.

St Finnian's Irish Life gives the most primitive account now extant of his career. All manuscripts go back ultimately to the same original, which was compiled by a Leinsterman writing in Leinster, almost certainly a monk of one of Finnian's foundations, possibly Clonard, who drew on both oral and written traditions for his material. The Life is an unsophisticated collection of miracle stories, combined with extravagant claims concerning the spiritual power and prestige of the saint, and giving full particulars, including a considerable amount of accurate information on local topography, of the churches which Finnian is reputed to have founded.

In 1765 a major decision was taken in London which amounted to the formulation of a new English policy towards Ireland: viceroys in future were to reside constantly in Dublin and the old system of undertakers was to be overthrown. But it was not until 1767 that British government found in Viscount Townsend a nobleman prepared to carry out the new policy. By May of 1768 Townsend had reached the crisis point in his relations with the undertakers. They had just behaved in an utterly intolerable manner in the viceroy’s eyes by using their influence as the principal servants of the crown to secure the rejection in the house of commons of the crown’s scheme to increase the number of troops on the Irish establishment, on which the king’s ministers in London had set very great store. The augmentation was the principal issue over which the fierce struggle between the viceroy and the undertakers was fought, but the true question to be settled, as Townsend insisted over and over again with characteristic vehemence, was of deeper significance. Was the undertaker system, which had allowed a considerable measure of autonomy to a small oligarchy in Ireland, to be allowed to continue? Or was a bold policy to be pursued of re-establishing once and for all the power of the king’s representative in Ireland, especially in the control of patronage, thus administering a serious check to the self-governing aspirations of the Anglo-Irish gentry, and emphasising Ireland’s subordination to England?

The recent digitisation of the 1641 depositions has opened up that large and controversial collection of manuscripts to renewed study. The significance of a substantial section of that archive generated in 1653–4 by the work of the Cromwellian delinquency commissions has hitherto been poorly understood. This article sheds new light on the workings of the commissions and on the ways in which the ‘delinquency depositions’ that they collected helped to shape the implementation of the Cromwellian and Restoration land settlements in Ireland. It also compares the Irish delinquency proceedings to the approach adopted by the Long Parliament in its dealings with royalists in England in the 1640s. In analysing the actual content of the depositions, the article focuses particular attention on County Wexford. The surviving delinquency depositions enable in-depth exploration of many facets of the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath in that region.

1968 has become synonymous with the large-scale global protests of that year. International scholarship has increasingly sought to examine instances of these protests in global peripheries, and amongst the most studied examples is Northern Ireland. The growth of civil rights protest in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, which emerged from long-standing feelings of exclusion amongst the Catholic minority of the predominantly Protestant polity, was influenced by a broader international discourse of protest associated with the long 1968, notably the African-American civil rights movement. Simultaneously, in the west of Ireland, a number of protest groups also emerged in the late 1960s, frustrated at their communities’ perceived neglect by the government of the Republic of Ireland. This article will examine the emergence of these protest movements, discussing groups in the Galway Gaeltacht and other peripheral rural areas of Connacht, student activists in University College Galway, and campaigns challenging racism against the Travelling community. It will argue that they were influenced by the global protests associated with the long 1968, most notably by events across the border. For the purpose of the article, the ‘west of Ireland’ refers to the five Connacht counties of Galway, Roscommon, Mayo, Sligo and Leitrim.

This article examines a petition drawn up by Robert Ayleway, an official within the Irish fiscal-military state in 1692, in connection with charges of corruption and incompetence during the Williamite Wars (1689–91). Ayleway’s petition, and his wider career, demonstrate that he was part of a process of English and Irish state formation that had begun well before 1688, driven by informal patronage networks as much as by formal bureaucratic developments, creating an entrenched interest group of officials that nevertheless came into conflict after 1689 with new officers, many of them foreign, who came to Ireland in William III’s train. Both sides suspected the loyalty of the other, but the petition reveals that Ayleway saw himself, with some justice, as a competent and loyal official who had used his private means to serve the public in a way that had also advanced his own private interests, suggesting something of the ethos of officials within the new Irish (and English) fiscal-military state.

Over the last decade, network analysis has developed as an approach within digital humanities as a wider array of tools has become available to humanities scholars, and these approaches are now beginning to make an impact on the disciplines of history and English. This article presents an overview of different ways of approaching network analysis. It assesses recent projects to see how they accounted for gender in their datasets and what can be learnt about early modern women from these projects. It then looks at how projects in Ireland are engaging with network analysis, discussing the approaches used by RECIRC and introducing MACMORRIS's analysis of the Dictionary of Irish biography (D.I.B.) and the Bardic Poetry Database (B.P.D.), looking at how the latter is attempting to overcome the unconscious gender bias inherent in the D.I.B.'s selection of early modern lives from the period between 1541 and 1660. Finally, it points to some of the wider issues we as scholars face when engaging with this methodology, such as access to the required training and collaboration, arguing that while these are not unique challenges to the study of gender history in Ireland, they are important debates that can enhance scholarship in the field.

Elizabeth Butler, marchioness of Ormonde, came to prominence during the middle years of the seventeenth century as a result of her care of Protestant refugees in the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion; her royalist exile in Caen; her successful claim to a portion of the confiscated Ormonde estate; and her subsequent retirement to Dunmore in County Kilkenny. Her letters from the 1650s and 1660 provide valuable insight on her role as an influential Irish royalist, and specifically reveal the importance of women in the social and political network that supported her through this tumultuous period. Prominent among the women in her network include the anonymous ‘JH’, a kinswoman who acted as Ormonde's intelligencer and spy in Cromwell's court in London in the early 1650s; Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, an acquaintance who wielded significant influence with the Cromwellian administration in Dublin and acted as Ormonde's intermediary in the mid 1650s; a group of pre-eminent British noblewomen from prominent royalist families with whom Ormonde maintained a relationship of mutual support from the 1650s into the 1660s; and finally Anne Hume, Ormonde's friend, confidante and long-serving waiting gentlewoman, who acted as her agent and messenger as Ormonde prepared for the Restoration in May 1660. Offering a more granular examination of Ormonde's activities during the 1650s than has been undertaken to date, this article shows that women were of primary importance to Ormonde's survival and indeed thriving through the Interregnum. More broadly, it indicates that female alliances were key to women's political agency in Cromwellian Ireland and that women were central to royalist political activity during the Interregnum.

The Irish question, in one form or another, became a feature of American public life from the period of the great Irish migration to the United States in the 1840s to the twentieth century. Seemingly each generation saw a version of the Irish struggle for self-government played out in both Ireland and America. By 1920 this struggle, in the shape of the War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War, had assumed dramatic proportions.

Many Irish-Americans, anxious to assist and support the nationalist movement in Ireland, resumed their traditional role of raising money for Ireland and attempting to influence the American government to intercede in some way on Ireland’s behalf. In 1919 Eamon de Valera, president of Dáil Íireann, went to the United States to further these objectives. However, serious rifts developed within the leadership of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States which caused Irish-Americans to divide into several hostile groups. The result was that during the summer and autumn of 1920, when crown forces in Ireland were escalating their military campaign, the Irish-American nationalist movement was largely ineffectual.

The point of origin of the ‘Irish historiographical revolution’ initiated by T. W. Moody and R. D. Edwards in the 1930s, which issued, among other things, in the foundation of Irish Historical Studies, is customarily located in their experiences together as research students in London University’s Institute of Historical Research. Hitherto, we have known little or nothing of those experiences beyond the recollections of the two principals themselves. This article uses the Institute’s own archive, and other contemporary documentary evidence, including surviving letters from Moody to Edwards, to elucidate the precise influence of the Institute and its staff in moulding their outlook. Rather than asserting some form of ideological indoctrination – for example in propagating an ethos of ‘value-free’ history writing – it argues that what was important was the example of the Institute’s institutional structures (including its Bulletin), which Moody and Edwards determined to replicate in Ireland; and that these structures, emphasising collaboration between historical researchers in pursuit of a common purpose, were themselves of the first importance in influencing the aspiration to create an Irish history free from confessional bias and overt expressions of political prejudice.

The modification of the Cromwellian land settlement in Ireland which followed the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 was regulated by two acts of parliament, one familiarly known as the act of settlement of 1662, the other as the act of explanation of 1665. They became the principal legal instruments upon which land ownership in the country was to rest for two centuries.

The act of settlement was the statutory version, with the major addition of a preamble, of the so-called ‘Gracious declaration’ of 30 November 1660, a royal proclamation which enunciated the broad principles upon which the settlement was to be based. In its statutory form these principles were: the vesting in the king, as trustee for the purposes of the act, of all land confiscated since 23 October 1641 as a consequence of the rebellion, with the general exception of the land held on that date by the church and Trinity College, Dublin; the general confirmation to the adventurers and Cromwellian soldiers of the land they held on 7 May 1659; and the restoration of various classes of dispossessed proprietors, chiefly those catholics who could prove, before the commissioners appointed to execute the terms of the act, that they were innocent of having participated in the rebellion. Those found innocent were to be restored to their estates immediately without having to wait until the Cromwellian planters had first been ‘reprised’ (i.e. compensated) with land of equal value.