Demarcated to the north by the Shannon and its estuary and to the south by the Kenmare river and the Caha mountains, the south-western territories of Kerry and Desmond provide a microcosm of the tensions and interactions characteristic of early modern Ireland. Although historically divided into roughly two corresponding halves representing the outcome of thirteenth-century Gaelic/Anglo-Norman conflict, the area approximating to the modern administrative division of Kerry was defined by Gaelic cultural ascendancy and by the similar (though differing in scale) seigneurial ambitions of successive Fitzgerald and MacCarthy magnates. Significantly, a territorial division configured along ethnic lines was not replicated at a cultural level, where a remarkable level of homogeneity prevailed in terms of the currency of Gaelic language and literature. However, the defeat and execution of the fourteenth earl of Desmond and the distribution of his lands among English settlers under the auspices of the government-sponsored Munster plantation inaugurated profound political, social and religious turmoil in the province. In Kerry, also, consolidation of the New English military, social and legal presence in the wake of the redistribution of the earl of Desmond’s lands precipitated levels of political and cultural dissonance unparalleled since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The structure and nature of the electoral system in Hanoverian Ireland remains an under-explored aspect of Irish political history. A number of older works remain influential, partly because they have not been superseded by modern studies. Of these, Edward and Annie Porritt’s The unreformed House of Commons stands out. In a section on the parliamentary representation in Ireland, the Porritts examined the differences between the British and Irish systems, contrasting the more open and generally progressive British system to that of a closed and restricted Irish one, where the Protestant political elite maintained a firm grip on local power and preferment. While now superseded for England, the Porritts’ thesis remained -and to some extent remains - popular among Irish historians.

In an influential article, William Lowe and Elizabeth Malcolm have argued that the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) became ‘domesticated’ between its formation in 1836 and its disbandment in 1922:

Trotsky of Russia knows Francis McCullagh. So does President Calles of Mexico. Peter, the King of Serbia, was McCullagh’s friend. The headhunters of the upper Amazon list Francis McCullagh as one of their principal deities. The warring tribes of Morocco call him blood brother. A room is always ready for him in the imperial palace of Siam. The latchstrings of hundreds of Siberian peasant huts are out in anticipation of his coming.

For much of the twentieth century, Ireland was quite unusual in comparison with other western European nations in its exclusion of women from policing. By the time women were allowed to join the national police force, the Garda Síochána, in 1957, women were already established in the police forces of Britain, Germany and France, as well as that of Northern Ireland. Further afield, women were already employed in police forces in Poland, New Zealand and the U.S. The appointment of women police was a major demand of feminists, moral campaigners and social reformers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all of whom sought better protections for women. As in the U.K., U.S. and many European countries, women’s organisations in the Irish Free State were to the forefront of the debate over the need for women police. Beginning with the Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (I.W.S.L.G.A.) in 1915, women’s organisations such as the National Council of Women, Joint Committee of Women’s Societies and Social Workers (J.C.W.S.S.W.), and the Catholic Women’s Federation campaigned relentlessly for nearly half a century in the face of governmental indifference and obstruction. When the first class of ‘experimental’ women police emerged in 1958 from the Garda training college in Templemore, County Tipperary, women’s organisations hailed it as a victory.

The effectiveness of the government of Ireland throughout the period of its rule by England and then Britain depended on the accuracy of the information provided to Dublin Castle and sent from thence to the political masters, based largely in London. The text reproduced below is one of a large number of manuscripts that were sent periodically in the early modern period and the eighteenth century to inform those not resident in Ireland about conditions in the country. Some of these are calls to action for various monarchs or their ministers, with prescriptions for the ‘reform’ of Ireland.

The Reformation in Ireland has never lacked chroniclers, defenders and detractors. The reason for this is not hard to discern. The older literature that grappled with the processes of religious change in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ireland was based on a number of well-recognised and widely agreed propositions. The first of these was that confessional and political positions were inextricably linked, and the fate of one served not only as a proxy for the other but as an explanation for the trajectory of change; thus, to explain the failure of the reform process to strike deep roots in sixteenth-century Ireland, one had only to invoke the failure of the Tudor conquest.

Many strands of the complex story of Irish migration to Europe in the early modern period are currently the focus of active research by historians both at home and abroad. The traditional emphasis on researching the Catholic Irish who travelled to Europe to further their education is now less pronounced, as researchers move beyond the archives of religious orders and academic institutions into the secular archives of France, Spain and other regions of western Europe. This changing trend is probably dictated more by economic and social considerations than by ideology.