An analysis of the events that led to the Irish Civil War of 1922−3 and the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland in the opening days of the fighting. A description of what was lost and the background to the formation of the Public Record Office. The efforts of scholars since 1922 to recreate whatever can be recreated of the record.

The conclusion examines the negotiations of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which led to the formation of the Irish Free State, foregrounding the British-Irish political figures brought together at 10 Downing Street who illuminated the events of this book. Far from a sideshow to developments in Ireland, the concluding chapter submits, Irish nationalism in Britain was integral to both Irish and British contemporary assessments of the Irish Revolution. Irish nationalists in Britain, further, mobilised popular political interest, and activism, on an unprecedented scale across this decade of constitutional crisis, war, and revolution. The potential influence of Irish nationalism in British cities, moreover, occupied the minds and minutes of British policy makers, from Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George. How was Irish nationalism re-constructed across Britain between 1912 and 1922? Shaped by the influences of the Irish Revolution, British politics, the Irish diaspora, and the British Empire, Irish nationalism was the cumulative experience of layers of overlapping representations of, and relationships with, ideas of nation. In its modes of political activism, gendered experiences of political life, and representations of public politics, Irish nationalism was impacted by changes, and continuities, across the British polity between the late Edwardian, First World War, and post-war periods.