In an earlier article in Irish Historical Studies the present author argued that the beginnings of the Irish Free State’s campaign against venereal disease were caught up in a politics of prostitution that mobilised nationalist, republican and post-colonial sentiments, revolving around the struggle between military and civilian authority, and invoking the moral arbitration of the Catholic church. Susannah Riordan’s recent response has clarified the administrative history of interdepartmental inquiries into the threat posed by venereal diseases, setting concerns over the role of prostitution in propagating disease within the context of the wider public health programme. She properly identifies inquiry references to ‘prophylaxis’ with chemical disinfection following exposure to infection, and rightly separates the report filed by Major Donal Carroll, the army’s chief sanitary officer, from that of Dr Robert Percy McDonnell, Medical Inspector of the Department of Local Government and Public Health.

The most resounding charge brought during the last two decades against ‘revisionism’ in Irish historiography has been that of a tacit collaboration between historians and the government. This accusation is too serious to be left unexamined. Traditionalists have denounced ‘revisionism’ as a dubious device designed to prop up the border and undo the work of the revolution. Desmond Fennell declared categorically that ‘Both in its ultimate thrust, and as a matter of objective fact, [it] is the historiography of the counter-revolution.’ Séamus Deane defined it as ‘a provincial phenomenon’ and dismissed its practitioners as ‘neo-unionists’.

Why certain Irishmen came to use violence to obtain their political objectives during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 has proved a difficult question. A number of local studies of the experience of volunteers, following the example of David Fitzpatrick, have provided insights into the process of radicalisation but have not dealt with this aspect of the subject explicitly. A more systematic approach has been taken in the attempt to explain the strong variations in the intensity of activity throughout the country. What caused these variations has indeed been a matter of contention ever since the Anglo-Irish War itself. Michael Collins often voiced complaints about ‘slack’ areas in language that left little to the imagination. Since the publication of Erhard Rumpf’s Nationalismus und Sozialismus in Irland in 1959 historians have sought to explain the unequal distribution of violence by comparing the level of I.R.A. activity in a particular county with certain geographically distributed social and economic variables. Hitherto these attempts have been unable to produce a full explanation for regional variations.

From its foundation in 1930 until the end of 1934 the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake sold the overwhelming majority of its tickets in Great Britain. Alarmed at the success of an enterprise that was illegal in its jurisdiction and that resulted in a considerable financial drain to the Irish Free State’s hospital service, the British government enacted a Betting and Lotteries Act in 1934 to curtail the sale of Irish sweepstake tickets there. The result was a substantial decline in British contributions to the sweepstake and in the overall income from ticket sales. The British action threatened the continued existence and success of the venture.

Among emigrants, the canny and the politic have often risen to some influence. It is flattering to believe that such people made a difference. But for most, ubi panis, ibi patria — conformity and loyalty were the natural price of daily bread and the essential cost of any real eminence. Even constructive opposition presupposed this. Those who thought otherwise were marginalised, sensibly enough, by their hosts.

In his article ‘Venereal disease and the politics of prostitution in the Irish Free State’ Philip Howell argues that in 1926, following the submission of the Report of the interdepartmental committee of inquiry regarding venereal disease, the Irish government was confronted with ‘a series of proposals to regulate prostitution in the Free State’ These proposals are associated with the influence brought to bear by the army on the committee’s deliberations, and it is suggested that this preferred military solution to venereal disease falls into a European pattern in which state formation was frequently accompanied by such regulation. The example of Italy is offered as the most pertinent. However, Howell suggests, the government rejected the regulation of prostitution in favour of ‘a moral regulation of sexuality marked by elements of Catholic social purity’.

The purpose of this article is to make generally available for the first time a document whose content and context introduce their peculiar leaven to our understanding of a pivotal moment of early modern Irish history, the eve of the collapse of the authority of the ruling peace faction within the Kilkenny-based Confederation of Irish Catholics. The occasion of the document was the official visit to Kilkenny of James Butler, marquis of Ormond, some time near the end of August 1646. This took place at a time when rivalries within the Confederation were running high and the struggle to determine the Confederation’s effective political constituency was coming to a head. While a good case could be made for publication of the document on other grounds — in comprising Ireland’s earliest known surviving example of a speech of civic welcome addressed to a visiting dignitary, it is of special interest to the department of Irish social history concerned with civic performance, pageantry and public display — this is not the aspect chiefly pursued here. Rather, in addition to publishing the speech, this article attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of its delivery and some of the elements of the larger event in which it centrally participated, before considering the construction that the speech and its circumstances strove to put upon a volatile political situation in the hope — vain, as it proved — of containing it. As an adjunct to its interest in the Confederation’s large-scale public dimensionings of party policy, the article also presents in an appendix another document similarly hitherto unpublished, a set of verses posted upon the gates of Kilkenny at a time when the General Assembly was sitting. The assembly in question, probably the seventh, ran from January to April 1647. The city-gate verses appear with the civic entry speech in the unique manuscript in which it has been preserved.