The runaway British slave who called himself Patricius tells us in this Confession that on making land after his escape from Ireland the and the ship’s crew had to journey for twenty-eight days before coming across any other human beings. Bury (Life of St Patrick, London, 1905) offered the explanation that they must have found themselves in a part of Gaul which had just been devastated by the Vandals, who burst into the west in the first days of 407. The idea was tempting. The date 407, combined with 431 (the year which is known from Prosper’s contemporary chronicle to have been that in which Pope Celestine sent Palladius as ‘first bishop’ to the Irish Christians), not only gave a fairly firm chronological anchorage to Patrick’s career, but also forged for him an early link with the continent, whence, according to his seventh-century Irish biographers, Muirchú and Tírechán, he ultimately returned to Ireland as successor to Palladius.

The sole piece of ‘straight’ narrative, that is, of incident following closely upon incident, which Patrick has left us is the account of his experiences on the way home from Ireland (chapters 18-23 of the Confession). Briefly, on making land he and the ship’s crew pushed inland through a barren and apparently uninhabited region, where they came near to starvation. Such was their plight that the captain called on Patrick to justify his claim that the Christian god was all-powerful, for it was doubtful, he said, whether they should ever see another human face. Just then, however, they came upon a herd of pigs, on which they regaled themselves. Up to the fourteenth day thereafter food was available to them in abundance, including a find of tree honey, and, in implicit contrast to their previous situation, they had also fire and siccitas, that is, dry weather (or perhaps shelter).

The completion in 1967 of thirty years of Irish Historical Studies has been the occasion for a stocktaking (still in progress) of the achievement of those years in Irish historiography. They are coming to be seen as an era of remarkable advances in specialist research, in professional technique, in historical organisation, and in the publication of special studies, source materials, bibliographies and aids to research. Though this research has been unevenly spread, it has produced an impressive body of new knowledge on many periods and topics. The conditions for scholarly work on Irish history have thus been transformed; and there is a world of difference between the prospects for Irish historiography in 1938 and now.

It is a sad admission that the historical work of the past thirty years on the first seven centuries of Irish history can be very rapidly surveyed. Eóin MacNeill, who first laid the foundations for the serious study of early Irish history (and indeed of the Gaelic world down to its dissolution), expended his scholarship in many learned articles and brilliant essays. The task of weaving a consecutive narrative was left to the over-enthusiastic hands of Mrs Alice Stopford Green, since whose time no one has ventured to write a full-scale history of the period before the Norman invasion.

During the past generation substantial changes in perspective have taken place with regard to the sixteenth century in Irish history. European and British studies on this period have done much to confirm the continuance of essentially medieval society well into what it had become customary to regard as the modern period, while the clarification of successive stages of growth and change in the early modern period has also enabled Ireland in the later sixteenth century to be seen rather more clearly in its European context. Intimations of this change may be seen in the treatment of Ireland in this period in J. C. Beckett’s A short history of Ireland (1952 and subsequent editions), and more specifically in the most recent composite book on Ireland, The course of Irish history, edited by T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (1967), where the contributions by Art Cosgrove on ‘ The Gaelic resurgence and the Geraldine supremacy, c. 1400–1534 ’ and by G. A. Hayes-McCoy on ‘ The Tudor conquest, 1534–1603 ’, bring out very well the place of sixteenthcentury Ireland in the general sequence of its past. At the same time, it is clear that although the main contributions of this generation to the detailed understanding of sixteenth-century Ireland have added much that is new in information and interpretation they have yet not quite reached a position where a complete new synthesis of the period has seemed possible, however necessary it may be. There is no doubt that the understanding of the growing group of Irish historians interested in this period has been steadily expanding, that this understanding increasingly informs their specialist articles, and that it also finds its ripest expression at the level of synthesis rather in their university lectures than in print.

By all accounts Michael O’Brien, that fine scholar and most generous and unassuming of men, was not happy about his Corpus genealogiarum Hiberniae, vol. i. He had it in hand for years and spent an incalculable mount of meticulous labour on it, but only near the end of his life, with great reluctance, did he consent to its publication. The proofs lacked what he considered final correction, and he feared leaving a legacy of avoidable error. Of course what he did leave was an instrument of scholarship, the value and uses of which other men will be decades in proving out. To our gratitude for his learning and labours we should therefore add an almost equal gratitude to those friends who insisted that he publish despite the probability that residual error might still amount to a fraction of one per cent. Our thanks may indeed be the greater since we learn from the introduction that this volume was intended as the first ‘of a series to contain all important Irish pedigrees and genealogical material from the earliest literary period down to c. 1500 A.D.’. If it seems unlikely now that we shall see vol. ii or any of the others, we might so easily not have had even vol. i.

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.

It is intended to examine in this article an instance of Gladstone’s ‘sophistry’ employed in defence of Parnell himself; the review which Gladstone wrote of T. Wemyss Reid’s biography of W. E. Forster, and which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for September 1888, under the title ‘Mr Forster and Ireland’. Considered as sophistry, it is, indeed, a virtuoso performance; some of the documents material to the case are ignored, others are misconstrued, others yet are quoted so selectively as to disguise the fact that, in reality, they contradict the argument they were adduced to prove, and the whole thesis depends upon a play upon meanings which trembles upon the brink of transparency. Merely to expose Gladstone, however, in a practice of which his enemies have so often accused him, and which, in any case, is not uncommon in politics, would be to indulge illfeeling without benefiting scholarship. The review deserves wider attention in that it is also a unique interpretation of the ‘Kilmainham treaty’. Other accounts, in all their diversity, have tended to agree that the episode was in some sense a political transaction.

Arecent writer has drawn attention to the reluctance of historians to undertake a study in depth of individual Tudor parliaments in Ireland. He attributes this reluctance to the sparseness of the source material. Nevertheless the task must be undertaken if the history of Tudor Ireland is to be understood. The present essay is confined not only to a particular parliament, the reformation parliament of Henry VIII, but to a particular aspect of the parliament, namely its reaction to the ecclesiastical legislation which formally established the breach with Rome.

Lack of information about capital investment constitutes a serious gap in our knowledge of the nineteenth-century Irish economy. It is impossible to decide, for instance, how much truth there is in the almost axiomatic assertion that lack of capital was a major obstacle to Irish economic development until such elementary questions as the identity and motives of investors, the actual amount and timing of investment, and the channels of capital supply are examined. This paper considers some of these problems in connection with railways, the largest consumers of fixed capital in the midnineteenth century.

Gladstonian apologists have effectively distorted the intentions of the conservative government during the period 1885-7 in which Holmes was a member of it. Carnarvon’s unofficial meeting with Parnell, and Conservative ambiguity over the need for a new crimes act, provided two easy handles for criticism which could be used without any knowledge of the inner workings of the ministry of 1885-6. Holmes’s memoir is therefore of value in showing that there was a distinctly conservative policy on Ireland, a policy which in intention if not in performance stands up well to examination in conservative (or liberal) terms. It is certainly made clear that conservative policy, where liberal, did not reflect only the stereotyped opportunism of habitual weakness: and that, in cases where a reactionary policy prevailed, this cannot be taken as evidence of an ultimately reactionary disposition towards Ireland within the cabinet. Further, the very obvious hesitancy and equivocation of the cabinet on Irish matters turns out to hinge on opposition of personalities who were in underlying agreement, rather than on differences of principle or on any real attempt or desire to manoeuvre astutely.

John Toland was one of the most remarkable of Swift’s Irish contemporaries. He was a man of many parts and extraordinary versatility: a linguist with some claims to scholarship, a political propagandist and a speculative-thinker. At the same time, he was brash and indiscreet, with the result that he fell out with one patron after another and was forced to make a precarious living as a Grub Street hack. But his writings influenced later generations, were translated into French and German, and gave him an international reputation as one of the forerunners of the age of reason.

The United States census of 1910 revealed that there were four and a half million people in the United States who had beenborn in Ireland, or who had at least one Irish-born parent. The figures did not reveal that many other Americans identified themselves with Ireland, the country of their grandparents, or even of their great-grandparents, and it was not unusual for Irish-American leaders at that time to claim the support of fifteen or twenty million fellow Irish-Americans. A great many of these had, indeed, managed to retain a sense of Irish identity and this was in part because they, or their forebears, had largely settled together in Irish ghettos in large cities. In addition they had been forced inwards to their Irish community for support when persecuted by the ‘ Know-nothings ’ and other nativist groups in the nineteenth century. This Irish subculture in which they lived was cultivated by three groups of fellow Irish-Americans who had an interest in promoting an Irish-American community, the better to control and command the Irish-Americans themselves; the Roman Catholic Church, which was very much an Irish Catholic Church in America, the Irish political bosses, interested in political power rather than Ireland, who had risen to power in the Democratic party by their ability to control the Irish vote, and a third group which utilized the audience they both nurtured, the Irish nationalists. The skill with which these nationalists mobilized Irish-Americans in support of Ireland’s claim to independence added an important dimension to the British government’s Irish problem for it became a problem for successive American governments too. As long as Ireland remained tied to England there were in America men and women prepared to emulate John Mitchel who had declared, when he first landed in New York in November 1853, that he intended to make use of the freedom guaranteed him in America to stimulate the movement for Irish independence. It is the object of this paper to review, albeit briefly and incompletely, the significance of the activities of these Irish-American nationalists in the struggle for Irish freedom and in the development of Anglo-American relations during the period from the Boer war, which began in October 1899, to the Anglo-Irish treaty of December 1921.

Thus ended Lord Salisbury’s first administration. The division was followed by an impromptu supper of about a hundred M.P.s at the Carlton Club. I sat beside Lord Randolph who was in high spirits. He told me that there had been a similar gathering on the night Gladstone was defeated in the previous June and he hoped we should soon have another.

The house adjourned to enable the new ministers to be re-elected; and I spent the interval in Ireland. As I did not share Lord Randolph’s sanguine view of the situation, I thought it prudent to be prepared for years spent in the cool shade of opposition. & We gave up our horses and coachman, and put an end to all unnecessary personal expenditure.