In 1967 the late F S. L. Lyons published an essay entitled ‘The minority problem in the 26 counties’, defining the minority in the Irish Free State as ‘unionist in politics and mainly protestant in religion’. Since that date the topic has received considerable scholarly attention. Indeed the tendency has been to approach the cultural development of the new state in the years after independence from the point of view of that minority. While this paper does not seek to minimise the significance of the minority’s role in the evolution of the new state, it does seek to question the validity of the perspective produced by an excessive preoccupation with that role. That perspective is most clearly articulated in the published version of Lyons’s Ford lectures, Culture and anarchy in Ireland, 1890-1939. The vision there presented is of an island rent by ‘four irrevocably warring cultures’ (Gaelic, English, Anglo-Irish and Ulster protestant). The cultural history of the Irish Free State in the first decade of independence, it is argued, is best understood as a battle between two of these apparently immutable cultures. In essence this view presents the nineteen-twenties as the decade during which Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Ireland confronted one another in the arenas of language and religion. The images are now fixed.

Secret societies in Ireland in the period 1760 to 1845 have recently been the subject of an extraordinary amount (by Irish standards) of scholarly interest. The Whiteboys, Hearts of Oak, Steelboys, Rightboys, United Irishmen, Caravats, Rockites and Ribbonmen have all had their historians and various interpretations have been put forward to explain the rise of these societies and the nature of the violence they perpetrated. However, the Defenders, the secret society that dominated the 1790s and the immediate post-union period, have been relatively neglected. Admittedly some important contributions have been made recently to their history: Mr J.G.O. Kerrane has made a study of the Defenders in County Meath; Professor David Miller has investigated the origins of the society in County Armagh; Dr Marianne Elliott has explored the implications for future Irish republicanism of the 1796 alliance between the non-sectarian United Irishmen and the avowedly catholic Defenders; and Dr Tom Garvin has traced the lines of continuity between Defenderism and the later Ribbonism. Nonetheless, it remains true that there is as yet no comprehensive account of the movement and much about it remains obscure. The documents published below shed light on the organisation, aims and activities of the Defenders on the eve of their alliance with the United Irishmen. They also illustrate the complex web of archaic and modern forces that comprised ‘Defenderism’

The following list gives particulars of theses on Irish historical subjects, or on subjects having a distinct bearing on Irish history, which were successfully completed during 1984 in the history departments of the universities of Ireland. The information has been supplied directly by the heads of department and has been checked for accuracy and completeness.

The Commonwealth Labour Party (Northern Ireland), hereafter referred to as the C.L.P., came into existence on 19 December 1942. Its birth was the result of a split in the ranks of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (N.I.L.P.). This split centred on the personality and the political outlook of the man who had led the N.I.L.P since 1932, and who was to be leader of the C.L.P during its five-year lifespan: Harry Midgley.

Midgley (1892-1957) was, by the time of the formation of the C.L.P., one of the best-known and most controversial politicians in Northern Ireland. Born into a working-class protestant home in north Belfast, he acquired an early political education as a youth through the medium of the Independent Labour Party organisation in the city. He was close, at least initially, to William Walker, the most outstanding labour leader produced by the north of Ireland during the early troubled years of the labour movement. In addition, he met and listened to some of the most eminent spokesmen of British labour, most notably Keir Hardie. Midgley served his time as a joiner in the Workman Clark shipyard (where his father was a labourer) before spending a brief period in America in 1913 and 1914. After serving in the Ulster division in the First World War, he returned to Belfast in 1919 and quickly got himself a job as a trade-union organiser with the Linenlappers’ Union.

The Control of Manufactures Acts of 1932 and 1934 were ostensibly designed to ensure that new industries established in the Irish Free State under extensive tariff protection would be Irish-controlled. This legislation has been seen as one of the major implements of Fianna Fail industrial policy — a measure which indicated the party’s commitment to an introspective, self-sufficient Ireland; its partial repeal in 1956 and complete removal the following year has been taken as marking the transition from a protectionist mentality to a more outward industrial orientation.