This article presents an edition and translation of an Irish didactic poem found in a large compilation of remedies, charms and prayers that was written in the early sixteenth century by the Roscommon medical scribe Conla Mac an Leagha. The contents of this poem, and of the treatise in which it occurs more generally, are of inherent interest for our understanding of the history of medical learning in medieval Ireland. However, the poem is also of particular significance due to the fact that its penultimate stanza, which invokes the authority of one ‘Colmán mac Oililla’, is attested in two much later sources that provide insight into the transmission and reception of medieval Irish medical texts in the early nineteenth century, as well as into the relationship between manuscript, print and material culture during that period. The two sources in question, one of which is a previously unprovenanced signboard now kept in the Wellcome Collection in London, can both be connected with the work of the Munster ‘herb doctor’ Michael Casey (1752?–1830/31), who in 1825 advertised the publication of a new herbal containing cures derived from much earlier Irish-language medical manuscripts.

This article examines the 1641 Irish rebellion through a neglected manuscript account from 1643, written by Henry Jones and three of his 1641 deposition colleagues. The ‘Treatise’ offers important insights into the rebellion, but also advances a broader understanding of the significance of the early modern efforts to civilise Ireland and the impact of these schemes, especially plantation, on the kind of conflict that erupted in the 1640s. It is an evaluation that brings together both the long pre-history of the rebellion, and what eventually unfolded, offering new perspectives into a crucial and contested debate within modern historiography. The ‘Treatise’ also presents the opportunity to interrogate the position of the settler community, and their careful construction and presentation of a religiously- and culturally-driven improvement of the country. While it was a period of crisis, the rebellion offered an important opportunity to reflect on the wider project of Irish conversion and civility. It was a moment of creation and self-creation, as the emerging ‘British’ community not only digested the shock of the rebellion, but sought to fashion narratives that underlined their moral claims to Ireland on the grounds of true religion and civility.

This article offers a critical analysis of the representation of early modern popular violence provided by the 1641 depositions. Exploring the problems of how reported ‘speech’ was produced and recorded in the 1641 depositions, the article challenges the tendency within the depositions to represent violence as a spontaneous and immediate act, explicable by a racialised reading of Irish ‘barbarity’ and Catholic treachery. Exploiting a large cache of depositions and examinations in the relatively resource-rich urban context of Galway, it offers a micro-historical narrative of two brutal episodes of popular violence there in 1642 to reveal the complex histories and politics that might lie behind acts of violence in the Irish rising. Examining the local impact of the state's policies of anglicisation and Protestantisation, the paper recovers the prolonged, but ultimately unsuccessful, negotiations that preceded popular violence. Contextualizing the episodes, the article locates that violence in the more complex (and divided) politics of the city and in the radical challenges it brought to traditional structures of rule in Galway. Referencing the developing body of work on the politics of early modern crowd actions in Ireland, the article argues that the popular violence was political, both a consequence of and contributor to political change there.

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.

This article aims to further understand the Irish immigrant experience with U.S. slavery by studying Irish overseers on southern plantations. The Irish relationship with U.S. slavery varied according to circumstances. However, as foreign-born outsiders, Irish immigrants in the South had to accommodate the region's slaveholding culture. This article takes the story of the Irish as urban pioneers of the antebellum South out into the southern countryside. Those who sought employment as overseers had no qualms about profiting from racial slavery, and the nationality of a successful overseer was immaterial to planters. Irish overseers were not categorically different from native-born southern overseers. Indeed, Irish overseers had to be as ruthless as their American counterparts if they hoped to be successful. The expansion of the southern economy in accordance with the rise of the ‘second slavery’ created more significant opportunities for Irish immigrants to become overseers and demonstrates the essential whiteness of the Irish in the South.

This article examines the treatment of physical drill as a curricular subject in primary schools in the Irish Free State in the period from 1922 to 1937. In particular, it assesses the reasons why its status as an obligatory subject was reduced in the mid 1920s. It will show that the availability of facilities, resources and teaching staff with suitable qualifications were all considerations, while some teachers were not physically capable of teaching the subject in the early years of the Irish Free State. In addition, a strong emphasis on the Irish language and the view that a reduced curriculum was more beneficial to learning meant that some subjects, including physical drill, were deemed optional. However, the decision to reduce the subject's status had not been supported by everyone and it was mainly the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation which was behind the move. Following its reduction from an obligatory subject to an optional one as a result of a decision taken at the Second National Programme Conference in 1926, a lack of a clear policy on the subject became evident. By the early 1930s, the subject was receiving more attention from the Irish government, which made some efforts made to integrate the Czechoslovakian Sokol system into Irish schools. In examining conflicting views on how to implement the Sokol system, and the work of Lieutenant Joseph Tichy, the man recruited to develop it within the Irish army, this article also identifies the reasons why this method of physical training was not a success in Irish schools.

This article argues that the career and writings of the Ulster unionist propagandist and man of letters Hugh Shearman (1915–99) were influenced by his commitment to theosophy, which he saw as a logical extension of Protestant belief in private judgement. His work as a publicist echoed theosophist preoccupation with illusion and the perceptions accessible to initiates. Many of his writings displayed theosophist in-jokes, esoteric references and mental reservations. His apologias reflected theosophist belief in the breaking down of personality compartmentalisation in order to merge with the world-soul. Shearman saw the Irish republic as the ‘Pakistan of the West’, represented by him as embodying self-destructive insularity shaped by Catholic authoritarianism. In response to the 1940s anti-partition campaign, Shearman developed an apologia for the Stormont government as an essentially progressive technocracy, which he saw as culminating in the regime of Terence O'Neill. This article uses previously unexplored writings to track Shearman's life and career into the 1990s, when he is shown to have combined a view of the Irish question formed in the 1940s with a semi-conspiratorial unionist narrative of British betrayal.

Convents and convent-run institutions occupied an undefined legal space during the late nineteenth century. As homes for unmarried women, they combined religious ideas of holy seclusion with contemporary ideas of the feminine private sphere. However, women religious were also major providers of charity and welfare in Britain and Ireland, with many running charitable institutions. This brought them in closer contact with the state. As factory and workshop legislation towards the end of the nineteenth century expanded to include laundries, Catholic politicians used this ambiguous societal role to argue that Magdalene asylums deserved less inspection than for-profit laundries. In so doing, they both re-enforced nuns’ right to domestic privacy and promoted their operations as a social good. This created a legal exemption for convent-run laundries, which allowed them to operate with limited scrutiny or interference. An examination of the debates surrounding factory and workshop legislation from 1895 to 1907 exposes a precedent which continued well into the twentieth century.

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.

Queer history is still in its infancy in Ireland, with political approaches and the more recent past, and the gay rights movement particularly, providing the primary focus so far. This article takes a different approach by investigating the everyday experiences, identities and policing of men who had sex with men in the early twentieth century. Using two extraordinary case studies from Belfast during the First World War, I explore different lives ― from youth to adulthood, sexual encounter to arrest, and trial to life afterwards. I argue that queer culture in Belfast shared aspects with other western metropolises, particularly in terms of urban cruising, payment for sex and relationships structured by class. Public responses too, from newspaper to courtroom, were articulated through transnational formulations of respectability and masculinity. At the same time, however, Belfast's queer men were shaped by their movement within a peculiarly Irish network of places, both in and beyond the country's borders. Religious and political structures specific to Ulster also affected how such men fared in the legal system and in their lives following their trials. By detailing both the similarities yet divergences of queer experience in Belfast, I thus aim to raise a new agenda for studying male sexuality in the north of Ireland.

This article critically re-assesses Conor Cruise O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1977. It argues that O'Brien's most significant contribution to public life was the ability to deconstruct many aspects of Irish nationalism, specifically his rejection of the Irish state's irredentist claim over Northern Ireland. In doing so, it contends that O'Brien was one of the most important, and outspoken, champions of so-called ‘revisionist nationalism’ of his generation. The article examines three themes in relation to O'Brien's attitude to Northern Ireland: his attack on the Irish state's anti-partitionism; his rejection of Irish republican terrorism; and his support for the ‘principle of consent’ argument. The article illustrates that O'Brien was criticised in nationalist circles and accused of committing political heresy. Indeed, his willingness to challenge the attitude of most mainstream Irish politicians on Northern Ireland invariably left him an isolated figure, even among his own Labour Party comrades. Writing in his Memoir, O'Brien neatly summed up the difficult position in which he found himself: ‘I was altogether out of tune with my colleagues over Northern Ireland’.

During the twentieth century, Ireland, north and south, was infiltrated to varying degrees by a transnational quasi-religious and political movement, Moral Re-Armament (M.R.A.). From its founding in the early 1920s by an American evangelist and former Lutheran pastor, Frank Buchman, through the peak of moral revivalism in the 1930s, its Cold War work after 1945 and its reinvention as a secular, multi-faith, reconciliation organisation in the 1960s, this article examines M.R.A.'s structural and ideological origins and its evolution in Ireland, the U.S. and Britain. Based on primary source materials, it argues that Ireland, characterised by two ideologically narrow cultural and political monoliths, was not immune to external spiritual and quasi-political influences and that M.R.A.'s activities in Ireland confirm these distinctive religious and political cultures while also revealing similarities. Moreover, it reveals that non-governmental M.R.A. adherents were in advance of governments in their desire for peaceful solutions to the Irish partition issue and the Cold War more generally. The article, therefore, examines an international movement which had personal, national and global significance within the context of transnational religious, political and foreign policy studies as well as the national narratives of Northern Ireland and Ireland.

In 1969 R.T.É.'s 7 Days dealt with the issue of illegal moneylending, claiming that Dublin was ‘a city of fear’ where 500 unlicensed moneylenders used violence as a tool to collect debts. The Fianna Fáil government rejected the suggestion that loan sharking was widespread and that Gardaí responses to it were ineffectual; a tribunal of inquiry was established to investigate 7 Days. Previous analyses situated these events within the context of government concerns over the influence of television journalism. This article takes a different approach, analysing moneylending ― rather than 7 Days ― within the context of the rediscovery of poverty during the 1960s. It examines how social and economic changes, including the growth of consumer credit and the re-housing of large numbers of Dubliners, combined to make illegal moneylending more visible. Historical accounts of Ireland in the 1960s have had a top down focus on economic policy and growth. Here, the focus is shifted to personal rather state finances to offer a more nuanced portrayal of a decade often understood as a boom one. Moreover, analysing the nature and conclusions of the tribunal lays bare the contemporary resistance to those attempting to reframe the problem of poverty.

The nature of Ireland's place within the British Empire continues to attract significant public and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland's imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Decolonising the Curriculum have asked us to reflect on the assumptions, hierarchies and norms underpinning the structures of society, including the production of knowledge and the higher education system. This round table brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to examine the prospects, possibilities and challenges of what decolonising Irish history might mean for our field. It sets these discussions within broader frameworks, considering both the relationship of Irish historical writing to postcolonial theory and the developments in the latter field in the last twenty years. It also reflects on the sociology of our discipline and makes suggestions for future research agendas.