When the Anglo-Irish campaign ended in July 1921, the British government, in accordance with the agreed settlement, initiated the disbandment of the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.). For over a century the Irish police force, renamed the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1867, had carried the burden of policing in Ireland, and after 1916 it bore the brunt of escalating republican intimidation and violence. Now that the conflict was over and the R.I.C. faced dissolution, a number of questions remained outstanding. What would Whitehall do to assist former members of this force once British troops had withdrawn? What contingencies, if any, had been made by the British government for the speedy removal of these men who could not remain in Ireland ‘simply because they [had] performed their duty fearlessly as loyal servants of the Crown’? Was compensation forthcoming, and if so, what forms would it take? One suggestion which received close scrutiny was their resettlement in the overseas dominions — but how receptive were the dominion governments to this proposal?

Christine Kinealy has claimed that ‘more has been written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine than was written in the whole period since 1850’. This is probably true. Anniversaries of major historical events now give rise to commemorative events ranging from scholarly conferences to the unveiling of memorial plaques, even to pop concerts. There appears to be a premium on being first in the field, and a corresponding waning of interest as attention shifts to the next anniversary. Harvard University organised its conference marking the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1988. The summer of 1847 was taken as the cutoff point for the Irish government’s official commemoration of the Famine, in order to make way for the bicentenary of 1798, despite the fact that a majority of famine victims probably died after that date. Commemorating historical events boosts book sales, and publishers appear eager to respond to popular demand. Unfortunately the interest may prove too short-lived to afford time for major research, and many of the resulting books either recycle existing material or give the appearance of being in need of further work.

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.

Robert Dudley Edwards’s Church and state in Tudor Ireland is an extremely durable, almost monolithic, work. Despite recent judgements that it is shot through with the confessional bias of its author, it has managed to retain an eminent place in the Irish historical canon since its publication in 1935. Two plausible reasons for this durability are readily identifiable. The first concerns Dudley Edwards’s role as a ‘founding father’ of ‘scientific’ historical scholarship in Ireland. In this context, Church and state stands out as an archetypal publication of the ‘new history’ and, for the author’s increasingly self-conscious successors, an important reference point in any endeavour to analyse or explain their profession and its work. The second reason concerns the book’s recurrent utility. Despite its age, Church and state is still the most reliable single-volume history of sixteenth-century Ireland’s Reformation experience, a volume which provides informative and citable material for present-day students and researchers alike.

Politics in the era of Parnell and his contemporaries continues to exert immense fascination. The five biographical (in the instance of Philip Bull’s book semi-biographical) studies surveyed add ample texture to understanding this much-ploughed field. At the same time these works demonstrate the importance of biography as a tool for interpreting the past. Doubt about the value of biography as a form of academic historical inquiry has recently been revived by the director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, Patrick O’Brien. O’Brien insists that ‘unless the outcomes of a policy or set of policies are recognised by historians as significant and until those policies can be attributed in large measure to the ideas and leadership exercised by prominent politicians, then their lives, however deeply researched and readable, contribute very little to an understanding of the history of government and politics’. None of these studies were written with his strictures in mind, but they may well serve as a collective refutation, at least as far as the Irish past is concerned. They are also a testimony to the impress of F. S. L. Lyons on modern scholarship, if only in the sense that several challenge his verdicts.

I

‘A considerable number [of refugees] have left on a plea of compulsion without any justification whatever for that plea,’ declared the secretary to the Provisional Government in 1922, referring to the departure from the twenty-six-county area of disbanded members of the R.I.C., British ex-servicemen and civilians believed to have been loyal to the British régime in Ireland. Such a claim was greeted with scant belief in Britain in the spring of 1922 as perhaps as many as 20,000 people, some with their entire families, arrived on British shores and were given refugee status by the British government through its Irish Distress Committee, founded to aid Irish loyalist victims of the Civil War. The committee first sat in May 1922 under the chairmanship of Sir Samuel Hoare, a Conservative, and its function was to give loans of money to refugees from Ireland until they either found work in Britain or decided it was safe to return home. At first it had a budget of £10,000, which was fairly meagre, even by the standards of the early 1920s, considering that it dealt with 3,349 applicants in its first six months. Relief was available to claimants through loans and grants. Even at that early stage when the Civil War was far from over, the Irish Distress Committee realised that its work ‘only touches the fringe of the bigger question of compensation’, though perhaps it did not realise just how big that question was to be in the aftermath of Irish independence.

A list from September 1939 of files destroyed by the Department of External Affairs in the invasion scares of 1939–40 contains an intriguing reference to the possibility of dispatching Irish military forces to the Saarland on the Franco-German border in the winter of 1934–5. There they would serve as part of an international peacekeeping force while a plebiscite on the status of the territory was carried out under League of Nations auspices in January 1935. The context of this article is the events surrounding the creation of the peacekeeping force in December 1934.

That the Irish Free State should be mentioned as a possible contributor to the international force for the Saar is an illustration of the emerging mediatory role the state was to adopt after its three-year term on the League Council concluded in September 1933. With an Irish diplomat, Sean Lester, seconded to League service as High Commissioner in Danzig from 1934, and with Irish-born Edward Phelan, Assistant Director of the International Labour Organisation, being mentioned as a possible contender for the League post of Deputy Secretary-General in 1933, and with Eamon de Valera rising in importance as an international statesman and League supporter, Ireland’s involvement in the Saar was both an illustration and a result of the state’s prominent position in the League in the early to mid-1930s.

The Ministry of Education was, and remains, the most important government department for the Catholic church in Northern Ireland. As Cormack, Gallagher and Osborne note,

The devolved government appeared to recognise Catholic educational interests by usually appointing as Minister of Education one of the more liberal figures within the Ulster Unionist Party such as Lord Londonderry, Lord Charlemont and Samuel Hall-Thompson. However, in the first week of 1950 Sir Basil Brooke ‘surprised everyone, and appalled Catholics’ by appointing Harry Midgley, an avowed opponent of the Catholic clergy and autonomous Catholic schools, as Northern Ireland’s sixth Minister of Education.